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Ask Patrick McKenzie (patio11) anything - jroes http://www.anyasq.com/227-i-made-bingo-card-creator ====== bh42222 I used to poor, like seriously, food was an issue, poor. Both of my parents and other close relatives started many businesses. They all failed. They are all intelligent people but they all suck, and I mean SUCK at running/growing a business. I'm a pessimist. I have zero risk appetite, and I mean 0, zip, zilch, no thank you. And as an experienced software engineer, I make a quite a bit of money..... ....but darn it, Patrick's going to push me into staying up late, starting one side business after another, until one of them catches on, and I can quit my day job. And I've never even met the guy! Thanks Patrick! ~~~ patio11 You're welcome, and thank you. That kind of feedback makes me very, very happy. ~~~ pchristensen In that case, I'll heap some more on. I've been prevented from doing anything meaningful on a startup of my own for ~5 years, primarily because I was intimidated by the big picture of how much went into making a "real business". But in that same time frame (and in front of my over HN-ed eyes), Patrick has done great things and inspired me to refocus on small, incremental progress that adds up over time. Now I make sure I don't let a single week go by without doing _something_ to improve my technical and business situation. Patrick is inspiring because he seems like so much more of a relatable Everyman that more developers can relate to. Plus he's a super nice guy! ~~~ prawn What I like is that, even more so in the past, the financial figures are just so small in comparison to what we normally read. So many HN stories are about billion dollar valuations and million dollar investments, but with Patrick we see $30k presented in epic detail and with pride because for a humble side project I imagine it's been quite a journey. (I have a side project too that grew from a bit of mucking around to enough passive income that I could entertain a modest retirement, so I know where he's coming from.) ~~~ yeahsure Could you tell us more about your side project? Your comment made me _very_ curious! ~~~ prawn Catalogue of interior design photos for inspiration. Got lucky with SEO so I don't think there's much value in describing it in detail like Bingo Card Creator though - entire site didn't take much to put together. The parallel I wanted to draw was watching the numbers (sales, ad clicks, whatever) come through each week and sometimes pinching yourself. ------ kloncks His answer for why he lives in Ogaki is amazing. Excerpt: _By total accident, that job was in Ogaki. I'm not much of a poet but I would write love sonnets for this town. I love the air, I love the water, I love my friends, I love my community, I love my little church, I love the little sushi shop I've been going to for seven years where everybody knows my name, and I love my girlfriend. Tokyo is a nice place. New York is a nice place. Chicago is a nice place. But I want to live in Ogaki._ ~~~ shazow Also this part: _I live in Ogaki. Ogaki is in Japan. If Ogaki were in Kansas, I would live in Kansas._ ------ rmason I see they asked you about writing a book. I've been waiting for you to write the definitive book on SEO. Have you thought about bypassing a publisher and just producing a PDF and selling it directly? Then the only cost you'd have would to pay for a good editor and the rest would be profit. I'd gladly pay $50 to learn everything you know about SEO. I'd bet you could sell a couple thousand copies on HN alone. Would that be enough money for it to be worth your while? ~~~ statictype _I'd gladly pay $50 to learn everything you know about SEO_ I would too. The problem is, there are people that will gladly pay 500x that amount for some of what he knows about SEO. ~~~ rmason Yet some of the most successful consultants have written books on the subject of their expertise. Somehow I don't think a book would discourage consulting clients. They want him looking at their situation and data with the benefit of everything he's learned since writing the book. If it gives him a higher profile it might actually result in more consulting gigs. ~~~ patio11 _If it gives him a higher profile it might actually result in more consulting gigs._ So if you take one gram of sodium and add it to a room filled with chlorine gas, you end up with a wee little pile of salt. Pumping more gas into the room does not increase the amount of salt you get, because the sodium is the limiting reagent. The limiting reagent in the number of consulting gigs I do every year is not the number of people who wish me to consult for them. It is closer to "How many weeks do I want to spend consulting?" That number is about ten to twelve weeks a year. I can fill my dance card at that number without needing to work very hard on getting the word out to new people. It might make sense if I wanted to scale a consulting business up by hiring employees, training them to be Mini Me, and then closing clients on consulting engagements with fulfillment to be done by the Mini Mes. That is an option. It isn't one which really fits in with my plans for life at the moment. ~~~ tomjen3 If you have too many customers for the time available, why not increase the price? And about the book, you can write down a somewhat detailed point-by-point walkthrough and outsource the actual writing of the book. Then sell it as an info product on your website for, say, $150 -- it is easily worth the money, which you get to keep most of and you can A/B test it like crazy. Heck you could dictate the book while traveling and never have to write a line. ~~~ patio11 _If you have too many customers for the time available, why not increase the price?_ :) ------ goblin89 Oh, Patrick's presentation on marketing to minorities is simply too awesome. (Linked in the answer about the female market; just in case: <http://businessofsoftware.org/video_10_pmckenzie.aspx>) ------ Inebas For me, I can only sign in with my facebook or twitter account? Is that actually intended? I am uncomfortable using those two accounts to sign in. If I could sign in, the question I would ask patio11 is this: What advise would you give to someone who wants to run a solo software business so he/she can live anywhere and travel anytime? ~~~ davidw Have you read Rob Walling's "Start Small, Stay Small"? It's the best book of _practical_ advice I've read on the subject in a while. [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YH9MMI?ie=UTF8&tag=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YH9MMI?ie=UTF8&tag=dedasys-20&linkCode=shr&camp=213733&creative=393177) ~~~ getsat Dude, disclose affiliate links on HN please. ~~~ davidw Dude, I certainly don't participate here to get rich off of affiliate links, and am not going to foist crap off on people to make a quick buck (my reputation is more important than that), but I'm certainly not going to disdain a few dollars for more books to read. If you don't believe in making money, perhaps this isn't the site for you. ~~~ getsat I make plenty of money from affiliate marketing, but this isn't the place to use them without disclosure. ~~~ davidw Just go ahead and downvote it instead of whining. Either the link was to something useful and relevant or it wasn't. The fact that there's an affiliate link has no bearing on that. If someone's spamming the site with affiliate links, they ought to be banned. If someone posts a link with one from time to time, I see absolutely no harm in it. I think it's pretty clear what's what. ~~~ getsat I'm not whining, it's just in bad taste. I actually up voted your post because it was useful, and I DID buy that book this morning (just not through your affiliate link). This isn't the place to be using undisclosed affiliate links. Had you disclosed it, I would have happily bought it through your link as it would be a legitimate referral. ------ joeag Patrick- this part is especially interesting to me - "This might be shocking, but many of my software buddies _do not_ have fully automated fulfillment. If you buy their software, they get an email, and then they have to do something to get you what you bought. This is _insane_ in this day and age for commodity software purchases. BCC will automatically generate a Registration Key for you (for the downloadable version), and takes a variety of steps to automatically upgrade the software without the customer's interaction. If they ordered a CD, it uses an API at SwiftCD to arrange for that CD to be shipped without my involvement. Bookkeeping entries get made automatically. etc, etc " Although some of that process will be eliminated as more "app stores" proliferate, it's still a huge and "non-core" part of the process for most software application providers which should be outsourced, as credit card processing has become. I remember the days 5 or 6 years ago where you had to write your own payment gateway, etc, etc. If you are interested in reselling this as a package to startup software companies let me know, I would love to be involved, I think it fits a need. ------ losvedir _I'm 29 today._ Ah, Happy Birthday then! Thanks for all the insights you share on HN and your blog. ------ joss82 "It is a moral imperative that any job which CAN be done by a computer SHOULD be done by a computer, because the alternative is a waste of an actual human's life. We used to have clerks whose only job was to be MS Excel's summation function. Hour by hour, day by day, they summed columns of numbers. After Excel exists, the existence of that job is a sin: hour by hour, day by day, they are wasting their lives doing something when they could be doing something more important, more worthy of their talents, which uniquely added value to the world." This is so true. Does that mean that unemployment is not so bad after all? ~~~ relix I think it has little to do with unemployment on the long term. Humanity has been "automating" jobs since the invention of the steam machine. Some might say even further: since the invention of the horse and carriage, since the invention of the wheel. If you look at the amount of automation we've got going on compared to 50 years ago, 10% unemployment is surprisingly low. Apparently, our skill in automation is only surpassed by our skill in finding new problems. ------ damncabbage Is there some ridiculous character limit for questions on anyasq.com? Most appear to be squashed, truncated or generally just tweet-like in appearance; for example: How do you create niche when you are entering a crowded market like travel..what would u hv done if thr ws bingo cc alre You've consulted with FogCreek and Matasano, some heavies(literally and figuratively).What was your gauge for success? ------ 3am If you want to release an e-book with a little less overhead (and keep a large fraction of the proceeds) you could go with lulu.com or createspace.com ------ sourc3 One thing that surprised me in the interview was the fact that Patrick went with a sole-proprietorship model. When I started my B2B service as a side project, I went crazy looking at all the possible angles (a business suing you for a bug causing them loss of revenue, not being able to have a merchant account without a proper LLC etc) and back then it made a lot of sense to stick with the LLC model to create that shield in case something happened. Heck, one lawyer I consulted with even suggested I buy insurance. Either, I have too much to loose and I am not a risk taker or there is something wrong with the advice I have paid for/read online :) But the lesson is learned, from this point on, I will go with a sole- proprietorship model and avoid paying over ~$1K for the LLC.. ------ freshrap6 patio11 Thank you for your all your advice and insight, it is truly motivational. Have you always been so cheerful or is it a product of your environment in Ogaki, or maybe even your success? ------ jcampbell1 > If we stopped onanastically solving the non-existent problems of poor white > techy twenty-somethings and started producing actual value, nobody would say > word one about prices. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what _onanastically_ means. I was pleasantly surprised to learn it means "in a masturbatory manner", though I think it is spelled onanistically.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Steven Pinker Will Be Just Fine - pseudolus https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/steven-pinker-will-be-just-fine/614323/ ====== Miner49er I guess my view is probably a devil's advocate on HN, but I actually view cancel culture as (mostly) good. I believe that that power should always be as decentralized as possible. Because of that, I think power should be taken away extremely easily. That's what we're seeing with cancel culture; power being taken away, sometimes even for less then I would agree with. Overall though, I think the message it sends is good - be extremely careful not to abuse your power/platform, or else expect it to maybe be taken away. I just hope the net result is that we don't give so much of our attention and power to so little people in the future, and instead find ways to spread it out. ~~~ apsec112 Celebrities will be fine, but cancel culture hurts ordinary workers, who may be suddenly fired without having anything to fall back on and a family to support. Here's a list someone collected: [https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404648389926913](https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404648389926913) ~~~ ideals Maybe cancel culture will cause people to rethink at-will employment and opinions about unions. The 'cancelers' are collectively advocating against you, but you as a weak at- will employee have no one advocating for you. ('you' in this statement isn't directed at any one person or apsec) ~~~ apsec112 FYI, there was a long thread about that a few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23856918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23856918)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Top Real-Time Web Products of 2010 - rwwmike http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_real-time_web_products_of_2010.php ====== rwwmike What I really want to know is, what did I leave out? And how long is it until "real-time" is a given? Sorta like calling something "social"?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Who's Hiring? (Jan '11 H1b/International Edition) - agentx I <i>honestly</i> didn't want to add to the clutter on the frontpage, but once again, I didn't see anything specific for those in need of visa sponsorship (H1b).<p>So if you're hiring (and sponsoring H1b), perhaps you could say so in this thread, or simply add on or edit your response in the other "Who's Hiring?" thread.<p>Thanks. ====== neilkumar Yelp is hiring engineers, sys admins, product managers and more --- <http://www.yelp.com/careers> (+ h1b sponsorships) ------ pjy04 We need an experienced iPhone developer in LA to work on a project for us. Send an email to phil [at] ipplex.com ------ anonymoushn imo.im is hiring software engineers, operations engineers, visual designers, marketers, and software engineering interns. H1b sponsorships all around. <https://imo.im/jobs.html> ------ drew_kutchar We have an open linux admin position in LA. Send resumes to jobs[at]venarc[dot]com ------ elviejo For foreigners I'd like to mention that hiring Mexicans and Canadians is pretty easy with the TN visa. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TN_status> ~~~ rhymeswithcycle Can anyone share their experiences with this? My understanding is that the TN will let someone with a CS degree take a "Computer System Analyst" job, but you have to show that the job consists of requirements analysis and architecture rather than coding. Is this true in practice? Have any hackers here worked on TN visas? ~~~ dstein If you don't have a computer engineering degree I'd forget about trying to obtain a TN. I'm Canadian and was working in the US for many years as a web developer under the TN "scientific technologist" category. I don't have a CE degree, and it was generally very iffy whether they'd extend the TN each year, but they did... until 2008 when they started coming down really hard. I don't know if they started cracking down on TN's in general, but long story short... even while working _legally_ in the United States and holding a valid TN I ended up getting flagged in the US customs database as an illegal immigrant and will probably have trouble if I even try to visit the country again. ------ keithclark I'm hiring hackers,mobile developers, a crisis team, and PR people to work with me on my Maryland based start-up. If your intersted send me an email klownkeeper@gmail.com ------ knandyal We are hiring web 2.0 product managers with experience in B2C fashion business and crack UI/UX designers. My email is knandyal at stylewok dot calm.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN:jQuery Signature - Getting a unique signature for a dom element - arunoda http://dokeeno.com/v/blog/jquery-signature:-getting-unique-signature-for-dom-element/getting-started ====== rcsorensen I just wrapped up some code I've used in similar situations: <https://github.com/rcs/jQuery.relativeSelector> Instead of going all the way to the body, this will find a selector that works given the structure of the page. For instance, a page like: <body><div id="firstdiv">Target!</div></body> you can get "#firstdiv" back. For something like <body><div id="#firstClass"><div class="firstClass"><div>Target!</div></div></div></body> You can get "#firstClass div:eq(0)". ------ gildas If you set the same value for "class" attribute on DIV elements in the example, the generated selector (i.e. "signature") won't be unique. BTW, if the selected element has an "id" attribute (with -by definition- a unique value), what is the point to generate the full selector (cf. "Go to Hell" with "bbg" id in the example)? ~~~ arunoda __You have good valid point here. __ for the first one it's kind of a problem. Do you have any sugessions. For the second one, answer is simple we may have several elements with same id but in different parents. That's why we need something like this. This is not 100% unique but a innocent try :) ~~~ gildas For the first problem, you could test the generated selector to verify it matches only one element. If not you can use, for example, the nth-child pseudo-class to select the right element. For the second one, specs say that the "id" value must be unique in the entire document [2]. [1] <http://www.w3.org/TR/selectors/#structural-pseudos> [2] <http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.2> ~~~ arunoda Thanks. First one seems nice. I'll implement that. But if the content is changed dynamicly we might face some issues. BTW: in reality developers do not adhere to [2] and there is no any browser restrictions for that. So I have to think beyond the spec. ~~~ gildas > But if the content is changed dynamicly we might face some issues. Regardless the problem I was raising, if the document changes dynamically, your generated signature has great chances to fail (cf. also comment from bdunn). > in reality developers do not adhere to [2] I really hope it's not true because it would really be quite pointless. Let's try by yourself: put the same id name (e.g. "testId") on two different elements in your example and then try this code: $("#testId") It will return only one element. So you'll never be able to find the second one with a selector... ~~~ arunoda >Regardless the problem I was raising, if the document changes dynamically, your generated signature has great chances to fail (cf. also comment from bdunn). Yes :) >It will return only one element. So you'll never be able to find the second one with a selector... Thanks. I was not aware of that. Now this encourage me even more :) If a bad programmer like me place two ids with same name. Extension developer like x did not able to get the second one. That why I need this ------ bdunn It looks like this ascends the list of parents for an element to generate a signature. This falls apart if you move an element somewhere else in the DOM - a different signature, but it's really the same node. IMO the best approach is still to use $.data('my_element', el) ~~~ arunoda Yes. You got a valid point here. This does not gonna work for 100% for dynamically generated content. But should work for statically generated contents. $.data('my_element', el) works if you everything works on the same page without refreshing the window. But I wanted a way to store the signature on a DB and make it highlighted at some point later. ------ arbales I'm not convinced this is actually a good thing to do. As noted by others, its unsuitable for dynamic content, and less direct than `$.data(...)` barring page refresh. Just not sure what client-side workflow this kind of tool is used in. ------ Myrth I love the example page. ~~~ arunoda Create a one yourself If you like :P <http://dokeeno.com/login>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: SnapPrint – Design your t-shirt in less than a minute - gerry_shaw https://snapprint.com ====== gerry_shaw I was frustrated that I work on a T-shirt printing platform but had no way to easily design shirts for myself so after pitching the idea and a couple of months of work we managed to ship this fun app. It procedurally generates SVG based on parameters defined by themes and was inspired by the many typography tools used to generate Instagram posts. Would love to hear the communities thoughts on this. Thanks for taking a look. ~~~ fizzbatter Heads up, i was unable to purchase a shirt, seems /checkout is giving a 500 response: POST https://snapprint.com/checkout 500 (Internal Server Error) Note that i also saw no UX changes. No error message on the page, etc. Hope you get this sorted soon, can't wait to order my shirt :) ~~~ gerry_shaw Thanks for the patience. We've been printing shirts for a year but this is the first day this app has seen production so a few little hiccups. Glad to see it's all sorted. ------ BoomWav Can you do baby stuff? I really want to print some crazy stupid clothes for my kids. ~~~ gerry_shaw I know we are trying source baby clothes and your post will help me make the argument stronger. Check back later and we'll have more styles on offer. ------ shafyy Really cool. Think about adding common umlauts like ü, ö etc. so more people can use it :-) ~~~ gerry_shaw I know! The special characters are limited by the fonts we selected. Amazing how many fonts only support a-z. Thanks for the suggestion. ~~~ freedompop123 I tried a bit of experimenting. Do any of the fonts on the website have support outside alphanumeric? ~~~ gerry_shaw Honestly I haven't checked. When I did some testing I didn't seem to get anything working reliably other than alphanumeric. It's a shame so many fonts don't implement at least extended ascii. ------ R3dat Good job, really liked the text effects. I think the printing will be via DTg? and what's the brand for blank t-shirts? ~~~ gerry_shaw Correct, printing is done via DTG mostly through our own print factory (CanvusPrint.com). Cheaper shirts print on Gilden, the premium shirts on Next Level or Bella Canvas. Thanks for trying it out. ~~~ fizzbatter Appreciate having the premium option. I'm buying a shirt now just for kicks, mainly to test out the quality of the shirt. If i like the fit/etc, i imagine i'll buy a few more. Thanks! Sidenote: If you can manage this awesome UX for more complex stuff (images? designs? art? w/e), would be really cool. ~~~ gerry_shaw Some of the themes have images. We have tried an earlier take on this app with user uploaded content and more control of the design and the results were not pretty. Everybody asks for images and I have a few ideas about how we can do it but we need to get some traction before more effort can be justified on it. Thanks for trying it out. ~~~ fizzbatter Yea, and i can imagine image quality is a big issue. I _want_ images, but at the same time i'm scared to even use my own, because i don't want just a ugly boxed image. It feels like it would require an artistic hand... which i don't have. What i love about this app is an unartistic fool like me can make a shirt in a few minutes. So while i _want_ images, i can't imagine what the UX would be like. Anyway, appreciated!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Collaborative Editing in ProseMirror - espadrine http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/collaborative-editing.html ====== josephg Hi! Joseph Gentle here, author of ShareJS. You quoted me in your article. You're right about OT - it gets crazy complicated if you implement it in a distributed fashion. But implementing it in a centralized fashion is actually not so bad. Its the perfect choice for google docs. Here is my implementation of OT for plain text: [https://github.com/ottypes/text](https://github.com/ottypes/text) Note that its only 400 lines of javascript, with liberal comments. To actually use OT code like that, you need to do a little bookkeeping. Its nowhere near as bad as you suggest. In this tiny source-only demo I do all the bookkeeping, and implement a working network protocol on websockets. The result? I can sync an object between the server & client all in about 150 lines of code total: [https://github.com/josephg/appstate](https://github.com/josephg/appstate) This code has no external dependancies except for the ot type itself (ottypes/json0 in this case - although it could be changed to text or rich text or something with barely any code change). Nice work making a cool demo - but I think you're using the wrong algorithm ;) ~~~ marijn Yes, but that implementation deals only with plain text. The complexity seems to ramp up pretty quickly as you support more types of operations, and since extendability is an important concern for my project, I decided to avoid OT. ~~~ jahewson If you have insert, update, and delete then you can build any other operation from those primitives as long as you have the ability to batch a composite operation. So there's no need to extend the OT algorithm to support other kinds of primitive operation. For nested structures, addressing via ids or linear addresses has to be taken into account but that doesn't affect the OT transforms, it's one layer above. So it's possible (though not easy) to have an extensible OT system without exponential complexity. Still, avoiding OT has led to some interesting new ideas and I look forward to seeing how things progress. ------ elisee Looks great. CodeMirror ([http://codemirror.net/](http://codemirror.net/)) is an amazing code editor OSS project by the same author. It powers Firefox and Chrome's devtools and is used in hundreds of other sites and apps (including the one I'm working on :)). Direct link to ProseMirror's home page with live collaborative demo at the bottom: [http://prosemirror.net/](http://prosemirror.net/) (click "Change" to select a room) And here's a link to the just-launched campaign to open source it (MIT license): [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prosemirror/](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prosemirror/) . It's an all-or-nothing ("fixed") type indiegogo campaign, not the flexible kind where the funds are kept even if the goal isn't reached. ------ braythwayt If you like ProseMirror, there's an Indiegogo campaign to support the project: [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prosemirror/#/story](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prosemirror/#/story) ------ williamstein SageMathCloud ([https://cloud.sagemath.com](https://cloud.sagemath.com)) is a completely open source ([https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc/tree/rethinkdb](https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc/tree/rethinkdb)) collaborative code editing environment built on CodeMirror. I love CodeMirror and massively appreciate marijn's work on the project, support, leadership, etc. I implemented Neil Fraser's differential sync ([https://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/](https://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/)) algorithm in it (back in 2013), and have refined it little by little since. The core sync code is ([https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc/blob/rethinkdb/salvus/dif...](https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc/blob/rethinkdb/salvus/diffsync.coffee)), and is BSD licensed. All development of SageMathCloud is done in the open ([https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc/commits/rethinkdb](https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc/commits/rethinkdb)), and it's very active right now. Our next big release, which should be within the week, involves rewriting the backend to use RethinkDB (instead of Cassandra), and the frontend to use React.js + Flux heavily (instead of jQuery). ------ marijn Just commenting to say I (author) am here this is a good place for feedback or pointing out relevant references. ~~~ erisds First of all, this looks truly awesome! I've spent a lot of time recently looking at the available open source editors, and with the exception of specifically 'code editors' there isn't much out there that supports markdown. I have been reading about the recently announced content-kit: [http://madhatted.com/2015/7/31/announcing-content-kit-and- mo...](http://madhatted.com/2015/7/31/announcing-content-kit-and-mobiledoc) and am wondering if you have considered the 'card' style concept for ProseMirror? I see ProseMirror has an interface for adding images, and says that it will support different document models in future and I'm wondering how extensible that will be. What sort of APIs are going to be available, will it be possible to create custom 'blocks' or 'cards' of data - e.g. defining a block for adding a table / spreadsheet - similar to what you see in things like Quip or readme.io? ~~~ marijn Basically, yes, the document object is designed to be extended by user code, so you could add your own kinds of nodes (even allowing them to contain existing node types, as in a table), but for some nodes (like tables) the impact will probably be big enough to require some specific UI-related code in the core. ------ marknadal I spent 7 months of my life dedicated to solving this problem and let me say, it is not easy because I failed. But I learned something really important, we are all doing it wrong. An index/offset based approach isn't the best solution, even with OT. Instead, we should have been looking at this problem as a linked list, where every character has a unique ID that can be pointed to. Doing operations this way is safe and becomes idempotent. I'm busy building a database to back this type of data, but will be implementing a solution using this approach soon. Great work to everybody else hitting this problem, keep it up! ------ sntran So, curious about ProseMirror, I read this: [http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/prosemirror.html](http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/prosemirror.html). Sounds very interesting to me. This is an editor I have been looking for so long. Google's Kix generates a lot of DOM elements. Medium's sounds good in theory, but I haven't been able to try it due to the requirement of Twitter, and its clones just mimic the interface, not the functionality (still using contentEditable). The closest one I saw was Aloha Editor v2. A little bit buggy and lack of document. But I realize I don't need collaborative editing. Hopefully this will be separated into a component instead of built-in. Not all rich text editors need collaboration. ~~~ marijn Collaboration is a separate module, yes (though some of the design of the core was of course guided by its requirements) ------ houshuang Very interesting to see the approach, especially his critique of OT, which virtually every other system seems to be based on. His alternative seems to make sense, but I'm not sure if the end result for the user will be better, or if it's mainly that the implementation is easier/less bug prone? I've actually been playing around with "translating" the server backend for share.js to Elixir, to be able to host it as part of a Phoenix app. Playing with ways of integrating with erlnode to run the actual test cases (including a fuzzer) from JS directly on my Elixir code. If this gets opensourced, I wonder how complex the backend will be (I'm assuming it will be written in Node?), given that it seems like the front-end is doing most of the work. ~~~ marijn A minimal backend can be extremely simple, just relaying changes, but if you want it to keep a running snapshot of the current document, you'll need the capacity to apply those changes to document, so you'd need to use the module used by the client, or a port of that. ------ falcolas Sounds like the same problems that have been encountered (and mostly solved) in many different online videogames. Might be worth investigating how they solved these problems as well, since their solutions will be much more practical than theoretical. [http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game- programmers/](http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/) ------ leeoniya hi marijn, did you end up using [https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown- it](https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it) for the AST pass?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Notegraphy, write and publish with style - meerita Dear fellow hackers,<p>Before submitting this, I wanted the app I've been working on posted on the App Store. Notegraphy it's a simple tool that help you to produce beautiful texts for sharing as you want.<p>We've made it with rails, AWS and HTML5/CSS3 and JS, also Boostrap. You can use it with a browser or the native iPhone/iPad app.<p>I'm posting this just to get your valuable feedback. Everything is welcome and, remember this is aimed for all kind of people, not just hackers!<p>https://notegraphy.com ====== xauronx Looks gorgeous, well designed and well made. The intro video and the marketing look amazing. The capabilities (seeing your stats, sharing to multiple social networks, etc) all look great, leave nothing to be desired. You guys did an amazing job. The only problem is that I'm not entirely sure what I would need to use this for? The only use-case I could imagine would be posting a nice looking "Happy Anniversary" or something to my girlfriend, but I don't need all of the fancy features for that. Or an account even. ~~~ meerita Thing is, this is aimed to create nice writtings. Long or short, make them pretty, so you can share them. They can be happy aniversary or a song, or a blog post, or a resumeé. We have more collections coming. ------ meerita Clickable [https://notegraphy.com](https://notegraphy.com) ------ thejteam I'm getting a blank screen in Firefox. ~~~ meerita Weird, we all see it in Firefox. Tell me if your problem persist after reloads. ~~~ thejteam I'm using Firefox 23 at the moment if it matters. ~~~ meerita We have the same version, 23.0.1. Are you using anykind of adblock or similar?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Here’s an unpopular opinion: We’re lucky Mark Zuckerberg is in charge - rmason https://medium.com/swlh/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-stock-drop-shouldnt-step-down-a4277737152e ====== archevel Interesting angle. Makes me ponder: What if Oracle owned Facebook? ~~~ 1996 What if government agencies p0wned facebook? For all we know, it is already the case. Even with the best persons in charge, with the purest intentions, the amount of aggegated data can cause great evil. And even for such a behemoth, 1/5 of the value is not something they can afford to lose lightly. They need money to keep going, and this means they can not do some things they may prefer not to do. MZ may have painted himself in a corner there.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
John Carmack's First Game - santaclaus http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2015/04/game-183-shadowforge-1989.html ====== brey ... similarities I found between me and John Carmack ... We both experimented with burglary as teenagers (he was caught; I wasn't). That's a curious phrasing - echos of 'experimented with drugs' or 'experimented with my sexuality': positive, life-affirming actions, discovering your true self. Does one discover one's inner burglar? ~~~ spiritplumber I would steal games from stores, take them home, copy them (using this ridiculously clunky 1x IDE cd copier that had to be mounted outside the computer in a frame and held up by elastic bands, to get a decent yield), and return them. I got caught, funny enough when returning a disc rather than stealing it. This turned into my first job as the guy agreed to not make a big deal out of is if I used my Ape50 to do deliveries for him after school for a bit. After the bit ended, we decided we got along, so I kept working there afternoons until I graduated, and two years fulltime after graduation. Then the place closed because a Euronics opened two streets over, and I moved to the US for university. ------ pdw The CRPG Addict also played _Wraith: The Devil's Demise_, his second game: [http://crpgaddict.blogspot.be/2015/04/game-184-wraith- devils...](http://crpgaddict.blogspot.be/2015/04/game-184-wraith-devils- demise-1990.html) And _Dark Designs_, a more elaborate RPG, one of his first games for Softdisk: [http://crpgaddict.blogspot.be/2014/01/game-133-dark- designs-...](http://crpgaddict.blogspot.be/2014/01/game-133-dark-designs-i- grelminars.html) [http://crpgaddict.blogspot.be/2014/07/game-152-dark- designs-...](http://crpgaddict.blogspot.be/2014/07/game-152-dark-designs-ii- closing-gate.html) ------ welder This brings back memories of my first game ([http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/179/17999.html](http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/179/17999.html)) I was around 12 years old. It seems pointless now, but was fun when I built it. ~~~ prezjordan Awesome, is it written in TI-BASIC? ~~~ welder Yes :) ------ tmerr >We both got horrible grades in high school despite having the intelligence to do better I'm not sure that's true, other sites report he got a 4.0. [http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/A-Ca/Carmack- John.htm...](http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/A-Ca/Carmack-John.html) [http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Carmack](http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Carmack) ------ SCdF On a similar note I've found Ben 'Yahtzee / ZeroPunctuation' Crowshaw's "Ego Review" series pretty fascinating, where his friend replays the games he made when he was a kid, and they commentate over it. The first one is here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlELK_3dGm0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlELK_3dGm0) ~~~ reidrac I find remarkable he still has his games. The very few I made myself in gwbasic died with the double side floppy disks (720KB!) were I had them stored. At some point at the end of the 90s I tried to recover them, but it was already too late. It's a shame. Not that they were good games in anyway, but that's how nostalgia works :) ------ santaclaus I remember having to buy a Ti 83 calculator for ninth grade math, and all we used them for was programming text adventures. I'm waiting for the indie game dev community to pick up on the trend of Ti 83 revivals! ------ sehugg So much Ultima influence! Some of those tiles look, er, very familiar :) I wonder if Carmack ever dreamed that in 20 years he'd be building rockets and the author of Ultima would have traveled to space. (Incidentally, in Ultima II, you _could_ travel into space!) ~~~ bitwize You _are_ dealing with one of the coauthors of "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement"! ------ jastanton Has anyone played it? Is it fun? ~~~ michaelx386 There's a video of someone playing Shadowforge and Wraith on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7py_FGQ5tU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7py_FGQ5tU) ------ chrisjohn93 Awesome	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Millions of routers allegedly backdoored with malware that can’t be removed - Liriel http://www.computerworld.com/article/3147958/security/millions-of-routers-allegedly-backdoored-with-malware-that-can-t-be-removed.html ====== PuffinBlue The writing in this article was so spectacularly unclear that it warranted this update: > Update: Intel Global Communications wants to make sure you don't think the > latency issue from Intel's Puma chipset is related to the malware-infected > router problem. It's not; the chipset causing lag is a big problem of its > own. Also, he says the fix “is being deployed.” Hopefully it won’t take > months to roll out via ISPs. It's obvious why this article is trash - it's a shameless rewrite of two other pieces that don't really have anything to do with each other (hence that update) and awkwardly spliced together probably because someone was up against their deadline and hadn't met their word count for the week. If you want to know about the first half of the article, go and read the original: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/03/intel_puma_chipset_f...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/03/intel_puma_chipset_firmware_fix/) If you want to read about the second that the headline here talks about, reads the actual Motherboard article: [https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-claims-to-push- mali...](https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-claims-to-push-malicious- firmware-update-to-32-million-home-routers) I'd ask the mods here to consider changing the URL in the submission/title of this post to the Motherboard one as this ComputerWorld article is low quality. ~~~ tyingq This picture in that second article: [https://motherboard- images.vice.com/content-images/contentim...](https://motherboard- images.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/40224/1481045574667527.png) Interesting that they didn't obscure the ip address in the login. It maps to an ISP in Ukraine...BlazingFast.io.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Top Android Apps (or "why is there so much garbage on the Android Market?") - stevenwei http://www.stevenwei.com/2010/05/18/top-10-android-apps-or-why-is-there-so-much-garbage-on-the-android-market/ ====== ZeroGravitas I'm not really familiar with Android, but one look at that site suggests that it's not an official Google property. So looking at the most viewed apps on a single day for this obscure(?) site might just be skewing things somewhat. The apps listed here seem a bit more "respectable": <http://www.android.com/market/> ~~~ pedalpete agreed, and where does androlib get it's numbers? I went to <http://androlib.com>, and their 'currently viewed' shows a much better group of apps (caller id, task manager, flight status, inclinometer, podcast). If you're looking at non-official sources, it appears [http://www.androidapps.com/?__utma=1.956696379.1274210202.12...](http://www.androidapps.com/?__utma=1.956696379.1274210202.1274210202.1274210202.1&__utmb=121418584.1.10.1274210202&__utmc=121418584&__utmx=-&__utmz=1.1274210202.1.1.utmcsr=$direct$\|utmccn=$direct$\|utmcmd=$none$&__utmv=-&__utmk=88162075) is a better result (top 10 on the right hand side) ------ joubert Last night I was browsing the/an android marketplace and I have to say that from the screenshots most apps looked pretty horrible on the surface. And yes, aesthetics matter to me.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Avoiding The Uncanny Valley of User Interface - blackswan http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000869.html ====== swombat Hmm, another exaggeration from Jeff Atwood. He's getting good at these. In my experience the metaphor doesn't stretch to RIAs. My start-up's main application is precisely one of those "RIA that pretends to behave like a desktop app", and thanks to Flex we've been able to get a good enough approximation. Result? Our users don't feel uncomfortable about it (although we have had the odd user who seemed to expect that everything would be instant even though it was a web-app). On the contrary, our users love it, and have commented on it positively many times. I guess people care less about that last 1% when looking at a web application than when looking at a humanoid robot. Which means stretching the metaphor in this direction doesn't quite work. ~~~ lbrandy Sure it's an exaggeration. The uncanny valley is a visceral biological reaction in parts of our brains that have spent millions of years become very finely tuned to identifying human beings. We have no such location for user interface. That said, I think there is still something to be said for the concept. If you are trying to mimic something, and get it 99% of the way there, that last 1% _can_ be source of frustration. (Jeff goes on to say because it _can_ be, it therefore is a bad idea, and you shouldn't do it. This is a poorly supported conclusion.) For example, stupid cnnsi.com has a "main window" that has some things at the bottom that look, feel, and act like links. Yet I cannot middle click them to open them in a new tab. This annoys the bejesus out of me. Another example is desktop-emulating applications who don't have a fully-functional right-click menu like I'd expect. By emulating other things, you put expectations into your user's mind about what sorts of functionality it should have. In this respect, it is analogous to the uncanny valley. The mimicry alone has created expectations that can cause frustration. But, that doesn't mean, that mimic'ing is inherently wrong or bad. It just means you have to do it right. You have to meet those user's new expectations. ~~~ stcredzero So basically, Jeff's just saying, "If you look like X, you've just set all the expectations of expectations X. You'd better meet them. Oh, and BTW it's just like this other concept that got on the front page of reddit!" ------ axod I think the worst thing you can do as a webapp is start with emulating the O/S - dragable, resizable, minimizable emulated windows and dialogs. I hate the idea of having "emulated" windows within a single browser window. It looks messy and confused. So on that sort of point I agree. I'm not sure what other examples there are though. ~~~ Shamiq But wouldn't it be awesome to drag a window generated within a webapp and toss it some place onto your desktop? (to the degree that the browser is just an extension of the OS -- kinda like a file explorer with more features) ~~~ ph0rque Yup... or being able to upload an image into a rich text editor by dragging it from your desktop or other folder. ~~~ Shamiq It's these kind of intuitive things that I love. The only problem is being able to guess what is intuitive to whom. Else you'll end up with a ton of features that no one ever uses (read: waste of money). ------ 12ren Abstracting (too much), it's violated expectations - like broken promises, people _really_ don't like it. Taking a tangential step, computer automation is similar when it purports to be able to help you, but doesn't understand you well enough to do so; like MS's "clippy". In contrast, Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button is automation that fulfills its promise (though the name emphases that luck is involved). Google can predict so well what I want, that this button is (very often) right. An awesome achievement. I added a simple command-line google lookup, to go directly to the page, and it's freaking me out how well it works: > cat ~/bin/g firefox google.com/search?q="$"\&btnI= & ~~~ tlrobinson Neat idea. Here's one way on OS X: open "http://google.com/search?q="$"\&btnI=" Or if you want to specify a non-default browser: open -a "Safari.app" "http://google.com/search?q="$*"\&btnI=" ------ patio11 The part about web apps -- meh. The part about gobsmackingly good imitation human animation: cool. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiX5d3rC6o&fmt=18](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiX5d3rC6o&fmt=18) Two years from now we'll be seeing that, or not seeing it as the case may be, in movies. Another two years after that it will be in the AAA video games with 9 figure budgets. And another two years after that you'll be able to do it from a Japanese cell phone. God I love technology. ~~~ mleonhard That video creeped me out a bit. :o ------ tstegart I don't think the Uncanny Valley can exist with regards to user interfaces. They were created from scratch. And they've changed, and are still changing. And neither a desktop interface nor a web interface is set in stone. See, the valley can exist because humans stay the same, at least to our brains. We don't madly change form or shape every 20 years. But user interfaces do. So how do our brains know a web interface looks too much like a desktop interface? It can only know because we know what both are "supposed" to look like. But kids being brought up on web interfaces that look like desktops will not have a valley because to them that looks normal. There is no set "desktop" look or web interface "look." Its only what we've created. Create something different, and the valley will go away. ~~~ donw Depending on your client audience, user interfaces might not change enough for them to really feel too comfortable switching -- for example, if even the _theme_ of my father's Windows installation changes, he has a lot of problems getting work done. If you have a web app that _looks_ identical to a Windows/OS X desktop app, but behaves oddly, it will irritate your customers in subtle but significant ways. ~~~ tstegart But isn't that an expectation problem? It doesn't behave as expected. But visually, it could have looked like anything. As long as the second thing looks exactly like the first but behaves differently, it will be irritating. But the first thing can look like anything you want and it'll never be annoying, unless it too looks like something else. Plus, someone who gets introduced to the second interface first will have that interface become their reference point. ------ mleonhard Maybe this explains why I hate using OpenOffice and other copy-cat software? ~~~ gb Office already had a pretty poor interface, so maybe it's more to do with that? I was pretty disappointed they didn't try anything different, but I guess the aim of that was to attract people who actually like Office in the first place. ------ jfarmer Eh, there's something to be said about web applications and the Uncanny Valley, but this isn't it. Atwood, I think, is saying that web applications shouldn't be like desktop applications because it violates the user's expectation of how a webapp should be. Applying the Uncanny Valley to this says that it's not bad for web apps to behave like desktop apps -- it's bad for webapps to signal that they have behave like desktop apps, and then fail to live up to that expectation. This problem affects other products, too. For example, imagine a really awesome semantic search engine called CantorSet. You can throw all sorts of questions at it and it appears to come up with the answer. "What did Bush say at the last G8 meeting?" Wow! Amazing! But then you ask questions like, "Why did my wife leave me?" No answer! Wow, this thing sucks. It's less about what the webapp does or doesn't do, and more about the expectations it sets and whether or not it lives up to them. ------ gstar Cappuccino is squarely in the "Uncanny Valley" according to Atwood, but I disagree with his analysis. If you look at 280 slides, it doesn't behave quite like a mac, but it's still intuitive. People understand the WIMP. I think he's conflating crappy Swing java apps with webapp UX. ------ far33d [http://far33d.tumblr.com/post/30017717/on-the-polar- express-...](http://far33d.tumblr.com/post/30017717/on-the-polar-express-to- the-uncanny-valley) I guess I should write more frequently and more in depth. ------ eli_s There's a big difference between web app and web page. Common web app controls (accordion, tab panels etc) allow developers to convey lots more information on screen and well thought out use of AJAX can make a complex application perform more quickly than the static equivalent. As the complexity of web apps increases users will need to get used to the idea that they need to learn how to use each app to get the most out of it which is how it works with desktop apps. Try to compare the UI between desktop apps such as a music editor, 3DSMax and MSWord. Each uses different UI controls (sliders, knobs, text input etc). Each app is complex and has an associated learning curve. If people consider the app useful they will invest the time in learning how to use it. I recently had to learn how to use Aftereffects. The UI and work flow were completely foreign to me - none of my existing knowledge was transferable, but I learned how to use it because I needed the features it provided. Ultimately the market will decide. My guess is that the line between desktop and browser will continue to blur and will one day disappear.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Humble Indie Bundle 9 released - makepanic https://www.humblebundle.com/#9 ====== jerf I've slowly been transitioning to Linux-only gaming, because the whole reboot- into-Windows just to play is a pretty steep bar. (Steeper than it even sounds in practice, as now, basically, every time I boot into Windows I have to spend about 10 minutes updating the damn thing, because I don't do it often enough; this has become a vicious cycle.) This bundle is _great_ for that, with all the Linux debuts. Linux gaming is still young, but it's picking up surprisingly quickly, really. I describe Netflix streaming as: "If you ask 'Does it have X?', the answer is no. But if you ask, 'Is there something I want to watch?', the answer is yes." Linux gaming is getting there, slowly but surely, at least if you can deal with Indie stuff. (And no hipster intended, but Indie stuff has come a _long_ way in the last couple of years. There's a _lot_ of stuff there that would have been at least A-grade, if not necessarily AAA, only five years ago.) ~~~ green7ea I have also been doing more gaming in Linux recently. I only have a windows partition for Starcraft 2 and League of Legends. If blizzard ever gets on board the linux bandwagon, I won't need a windows partition :-D. ~~~ Attic SC2 works perfectly fine on Gnu/Linux with wine. [http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId...](http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=20882) I don't know about LoL but you might want to give SC2 a try on wine if you haven't already. ~~~ barbs I found that I got pthread protection problems, but other than that SC2 worked great. No idea how well LoL works under wine, but DotA 2 has a native linux client. Just saying! :P ------ elliottcarlson Why does every bundle get upvoted to the top every time? I love Humble Bundle, I have bought a majority of the ones they release - but this is no longer news, it's their business model. If they were doing something new (like the introduction of the eBook or comedy bundle) then I can see it being interesting. Now it's no different then if every new AirBNB listing were upvoted to the front page. ~~~ larrik They're rare enough to be notable, and they promote Linux (usually) and charity. Why not? ~~~ brador They're every week. ~~~ jere They have a weekly sale, but the HIB is more rare. They're up to 9 and they started in May 2010, so... every few months rather than weekly. I don't mind that getting upvoted if the games are good. FTL and Fez are real damn good. ~~~ elliottcarlson Of the numbered main ones - but the problem is all of them get posted here - the THQ, FrozenByte, Origin etc bundles... They are far more frequent then you think: [https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=humble...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=humble+bundle&sortby=create_ts+desc&start=0) ~~~ masterzora As the guy who submitted the front-paged link to the Origin bundle, I thought it was interesting because it was a significant departure from the usual Humble Bundle fare and perceived ethos. Submitting every bundle that's offered, however, is just annoying. They have a mailing list for a that. ~~~ Wingman4l7 You must have missed the THQ Bundle, which was the start of their whole ethos departure, IIRC. ~~~ masterzora Perhaps it's just my personal feelings towards the relevant companies but I felt like it was a totally different affair than the Origin bundle, though you are right that it was different from the original ethos. The main similarity to the Origin bundle was that only DRM-full copies were available and, again, this was definitely a departure. On the other hand, while THQ was technically a AAA developer/publisher as well, by that point it was largely an in-name-only sort of deal. The THQ bundle was (or at least looked to be; I don't know if there's a definite official word on it) a last ditch effort to save a well-liked company from bankruptcy. Maybe trying to prop up a large company is not quite in the same vein as trying to support a tiny company but I personally felt like the spirit was mostly intact. The Origin bundle, on the other hand, was a different beast. EA is a large, _stable_ company and has a strong reputation for being anti-consumer. They also only provided DRM-full games in the Bundle but most of the games were only available on a service used by fewer people. And, for that matter, that seemed to be the entire point of the bundle: actually get people to use Origin. As much as I hate to say this phrase, the Origin bundle definitely felt like the HB guys selling out. ~~~ larrik The Origin bundle was entirely for charity, though. Kind of hard to consider it "selling out." AND EA let them post Steam keys for some of the games, even though the whole point of the bundle was to promote Origin. I'm not happy about them not having Linux games, but it's hard to really feel bad about buying that bundle. At least for me. ~~~ masterzora It would be one thing if it felt like EA had decided they wanted to do a charity event out of the goodness of their heart or at least like the charity was the point of it. As was, it felt more like EA didn't think they could get away with positive PR by actually making money directly from the Humble Bundle but they didn't particularly care since their point was getting buy-in. I don't mean to say anybody should feel bad about buying it--I don't think they should feel bad even if EA had gotten all the profits--but backing EA's attempt to get market share does feel like a major shift for Humble Bundle. ~~~ ewzimm I'm happy to read that you're complaining about the Humble Bundle's attempt get EA market share. That's as if someone were to complain about Orval trying to get Anheuser-Bush Inbev market share because their lead brewer once said he would buy a Budweiser. ~~~ masterzora First, if you think I'm complaining you may be misreading. I'm explaining the difference in perceived ethos but I have no problem with HB at all. Second, I think you already realise that your analogy is only analogous in that there's a multi-billion dollar company and a much smaller company are both involved. For example, AB InBev makes up half of the US beer sales with Budweiser and Bud Light being the top two US beers and the Budweiser family is the best selling worldwide. On the other hand, while Valve doesn't release many numbers, it's estimated that Steam has a strong majority of the PC game digital distribution market and Origin's market share is, obviously, lagging far behind. Also, it doesn't take into account the vast difference between Origin and Budweiser. Origin exists to sell you other products and you have to use the service in order for this to happen. It is difficult to overcome the initial user inertia to get them to join and install the service and to keep it running on their system so that things can be further pushed on them. Once this inertia is overcome there is very little extra resistance to using the service to purchase games. This inertia is also increased because the market of people who would use a DRM-full digital distribution service is not at rest but is rather largely moving along happily with another service. By offering a significant discount on popular games if you start using their service they could convince people to get and run Origin giving them that initial hook. Further, the Humble Bundle was creating an opportunity to have a significant effect on their user numbers. At 50,000,000 users in July, even if only half of the bundle purchasers were new Origin users, that's an extra 2% of people using their service, and they created positive exposure to many more that may have also joined or may be more inclined to join in the future. And, finally, I don't think HB was attempting to get EA market share at all. EA was trying to increase Origin market share; Humble Bundle was trying to grow their own service and make some money. (People keep saying the Origin Bundle was "all for charity" or whatever, but don't forget that sending a portion of the money to Humble Bundle was an option that I'm sure some people chose, if only by default.) Again, I don't fault HB for this but it is a noteworthy difference from their prior operations. ~~~ ewzimm Thanks for the additional thoughts. I'm not arguing with you. I genuinely appreciate that Humble Bundle is being compared to EA. I think their distribution model is a huge improvement to EA's. ------ jeremygallant Faster Than Light is a great game. Worth more than the average price by itself. ~~~ gtaylor Indeed, it's a simple and challenging little sucker, too. But a word of warning: It will make you feel like you're doing well for a while, then curbstomp you with zero warning. There's no saving/loading, and if you die, you start back at square 1. It definitely feels awesome if/when you finally beat it, but be careful with this game if you tend to throw things when angered. ~~~ afterburner You have to approach it as a roguelike, which does the same thing to you (way more deaths than successes). But I loved it. Played it many many times, but only won it twice I believe. For some of the unlockables I'd recommend looking at a walkthrough; for one of them at least I believe I decided to not pursue it since it would require too much random chance hitting all the right spots in the right order. ~~~ phenol You totally can get good at it, it's a skill like any other. I've won like 40 games out of 200 or so, and I'd say that I win about half of my games I decide to play past the first sector. You just have to have a good feel for progression. Always fight as many ships as possible, and only leave the sector when the rebel fleet is riding your ass. Know which weapons, events, and upgrades are good, and roughly what order in which to get them. I have played over 100 hours of FTL. Help me. ~~~ WA I was often in the situation that I fought every enemy but either didn't have enough cash or the available weapons were pure crap and I couldn't progress much further, because I didn't have the equipment. Since that happened way too often and I hate it if my success depends on dumb luck of weapon "drops", I don't play anymore. ------ middus You can buy this for Mark of the Ninja alone - it is gameplay-wise really great and a very artistic game. ~~~ kzrdude It's a very, very memorable game, but what do you think about replayability? I can't really bring myself to play it again. ~~~ wmf There are so many games being released that I appreciate a game that I can play through in 10-20 hours and then put aside. Speaking of Mark of the Ninja specifically, I thought new game plus mode was fun because you can use abilities unlocked later in the game in the early levels, and there's a DLC coming soon. ~~~ CrystalCuckoo Are you talking about the Special Edition DLC? It's already out: [http://store.steampowered.com/app/239570/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/239570/) Hopefully it will be included in the bundle as the week progresses. ------ barbs Rumour has it that Monaco is one of the games that is yet to be revealed in this bundle. [http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/monaco-whats-his- will-...](http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/monaco-whats-his-will-be-ours- interview.2241) Monaco's an excellent team-based heist game. ~~~ ekianjo It's not a rumor anymore, Andy has announced it officially on the 24th of July. ------ cocoflunchy FEZ! Awesome! I've been waiting for this game for so long. ~~~ Zimahl I'm probably the last person on HN who hadn't seen 'Indie Game: The Movie' but an entire third or fourth of it is about the development of Fez by Phil Fish. That said, I wish Fish would make a second Fez and just not say a word about it until it's maybe a month out. He'd still get hype and sell a ton of game without people pissing him off. ~~~ ekianjo The only thing I don't like about FEZ is his creator. And the "Indie Game: The Movie" just reinforced that impression. What a douche. ~~~ barbs I don't see where all the hate comes from myself. Mind explaining your position? ~~~ ekianjo The way Phil talks, the way he shits on japanese games （saying they are crap） , and his behavior very much alike to a spoiled brat. I have no sympathy for him and I strongly feel he should be way more humble about himself. ------ msg I too love this bundle. Pretty awesome that the three charities are Watsi, Child's Play, and EFF. The games are all very distinct from each other and top notch. My three favorites: Fez: a perspective-altering puzzle platformer. It's cute, clever, and well designed. FTL: a real-time starship crew management game, where you assign people to stations and target your opponent's systems. You fly through randomly generated galaxies and have random encounters. Super replayability. Mark of the Ninja: a stealth-action ninja platformer with very high production values and multiple paths to victory. ~~~ stevewilber FTL has a fantastic soundtrack with a chill, electronic sound. Great coding music. ------ MarcScott I keep buying these and never have time to play any of the games. I guess I'm doing it for altruistic reasons, as I love the whole philosophy behind the business model. ~~~ benjamincburns I'm in the same boat, and like you it never stops me from buying the next one. Like you, I'm trying to support the thing as a whole (Humble, the devs, and the charities), but the side benefit is that if I'm ever bored I have a whole cache of really awesome games I can download at a moment's notice. ------ narfquat Oh cool, Watsi is one of the charities that the funds are being shared with. Gaming for medicine! ------ aray All the games support Linux this time! Really looking forward to playing Fez and FTL. ------ dschep Mark of the Ninja is an awesome game, well worth whatever you chose to pay for a bundle. ------ milesf Gotta say I'm really impressed with the Humble Bundles. I buy most of them, and still can't believe how cheap they are, assuming you get in early. Their "unlock more products by paying more than the average" is sheer genius. Most people will pay just a hair over the average, which causes the price to creep up as the bundle gets older. So to get the best deal, you have to buy in early. I don't know of any other bundle products out there (MacHeist, MacLegion, Paddle, etc) that even comes close anymore. ~~~ SEMW > So to get the best deal, you have to buy in early. Thanks for the advice. I wouldn't want to give any more to the EFF, Child's Play, or Watsi than I absolutely have to. OK, apologies for the sarcasm, but, well— advice on how to pay as little money as possible, while usually great, strikes me as being in poor taste when the money is going to charity (and/or the indie developers, in whatever proportions you specify). ~~~ ckannan90 I don't think he was saying you should pay less. I think it was just an observation that people are compelled to pay now rather than put it off later, because they know the price will rise, which in turn will actually cause the price to rise for the next person. I think he was just observing that it's a smart system that both compels more people to put their money down, and slowly raises the price at the same time. ------ helloTree If you are interested in chilled thoughtful gaming and have a faible for SciFi ala Star-Trek and Co. you MUST try FTL. It is one of the best games I have ever played and I do not know another game that is similar. It is easy to learn and hard to master and although it is Single-Player it has an immense replay potential. ------ OWaz Fantastic selection! I love these bundles because the games are always great and the included soundtracks are a pleasure to listen to while coding. ------ shmerl At last - Trine 2 is DRM free. ~~~ onosendai Huh? I got it back in April from the official site, I believe, and it was DRM- free. ~~~ shmerl Was it? May be I missed that. UPDATE: I actually bought it for the Linux version now, and I had no idea it became DRM free earlier. In the past it was DRMed. HB writes however: _> Trine 2: Complete Story is making its DRM-free Windows and Mac debut!_ ~~~ onosendai Yeah, now that I think back on it, Trine 2 had been out for some time by the time I got it through the Humble Store, which was what Frozenbyte used to sell the game outside of Steam and other DRM'ed distribution channels. And I just got it again, apparently. Not sure what the 'Complete Story' edition is all about, but hey, more content can't be bad. ~~~ mineo (I haven't gotten Trine 2 before, so this may not be correct) The HIB9 includes a Trine 2 Complete Edition ebook, maybe that's what makes the 'Complete Story'? ------ michaelx In case FEZ is grey on your Mac, @flibitijibibo already fixed it. The second binary works for me: [https://getsatisfaction.com/polytron/topics/humble_bundle_ma...](https://getsatisfaction.com/polytron/topics/humble_bundle_mac_osx_mountain_lion_bugs_everywhere) ------ axelfreeman I bought Alienware X51 with Ubuntu (it's preinstalled in US-Region) and love this indiegames. They (most) work very good. I don't need Windows to gaming. Steam, Humble Bundle and WINE for older games. C&C Red Alert works better with WINE than >Windows XP. ------ nollidge Trying to buy with credit card, and get a message from Stripe saying "you passed an empty string for iovation_blackbox", as if that means something to me. EDIT: Nevermind, just had to pause Ghostery. Not sure what script was messing it up. ~~~ ebroder Sorry about that! Has to do with some anti-fraud tools we've built into Stripe Checkout. Should be fixed now, so you shouldn't see that again, Ghostery or no. Feel free to let me know (evan@stripe.com) if you (or anyone) still sees it. ~~~ ameen Gotta say, no one's kidding when they say Stripe's super responsive to respond, unlike a certain "Pal that doesn't pay!". ------ Pxtl Holy cow, this one is diamonds. ~~~ teamonkey Yep, the best one yet, IMO. A stunning selection. The only trouble is I already own all of them. :( ------ sobering This is great! Bought it but paid less than I should have. Broke at the moment. ------ bnolsen I already picked up brutal legends from steam for 5usd a few weeks ago. The sad part is that I can't deal with the camera controls very well while driving. ------ talles Mark of the Ninja looks amazing, buying when I got home. ------ danso Holy...moly. As a Mac gamer, I've been waiting forever for Mark of the Ninja and Fez. AFAIK, they've not yet been previously released, so is this an exclusive for Humble Bundle? If so, what a huge scoop. If I were those developers, I would've hawked the games on Steam for a couple of weeks...as Mac fans like me would've happily paid full price. edit: The average purchase so far is $4.37...seriously? Given the caliber of games included, and that this is the first bundle (I think) since the Edward Snowden revelations, this is a great excuse to give a large donation to the EFF. ~~~ breadbox This is the first game indie game bundle; they've been branching out. (The previous bundle was a bunch of standup comedy videos, actually.) But I completely agree. In fact, in the wake of Snowden, I made a mental note to pay extra attention to the next Humble Bundle charity split. I was planning to send it all directly to the EFF, but now I've realized that I can't just stiff everyone else. In the end, I paid double my usual amount. ~~~ daxelrod > This is the first game indie game bundle Are you talking about Humble Bundle? The first few Humble Bundles were all indie games. ~~~ PebblesRox I believe they're talking about the post-Snowden bundles. ------ michaelbuddy No other mention of Trine on here yet. That game looks so beautiful. I'm however having trouble understanding the steam key thing. I put my key into steam but my games aren't there to download. Oh well. Downloading Amnesia a Machine for Pigs right now anyway. That wasn't part of this bundle, but happened to release yesterday so I've got games in the queue before having to worry about this bundle just yet. ------ dalerus I am super impressed with the slider to choose what money goes where. Very cool. ------ larrik All the games have separate Steam keys, too. Sweet!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Increasing numbers of wingsuit jumpers are dying (2016) - curtis http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/features/why-are-so-many-base-jumpers-dying/ ====== chrissnell I had a close call this summer whitewater rafting on the Upper Animas River in Colorado and it has caused me to re-think every serious risk I take and has changed me in a big way. I was participating in a multi-day trip run by one of the local guiding outfits through the Upper section of the river, a much more difficult and serious undertaking than the Lower Animas, which is frequently run by average day-tripping tourists. We were on the No Name Rapid [1] and our boat capsized at the entrance to the rapid. I was stuck below the boat, my body somehow entangled in rigging, and was dragged underwater for some distance through a very fierce class V rapid. I was finally able to free myself enough to get my mouth above water and breathe, close to drowning. I managed to fully free myself and swam to shore at the first opportunity. When I made it, I kissed the ground and promised that I would never needlessly risk my life in the pursuit of adrenaline again. I cried like a baby when I returned home that evening and held my kids and wife again. Prior to this trip, I had done many adventurous and dangerous activities: rock climbing, ice climbing, lots of mountaineering, off-road driving, backcountry skiing... it really brings it all into perspective when you have a close call. All of that adrenaline-chasing just seems completely ridiculous to me now. [1] The No Name Rapid. We capsized at the spot pictured at around 0:04s. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjO37ABQ6mI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjO37ABQ6mI) ~~~ dvcrn Nowhere near that close for me and a lot more soft, but still one of these “oh shit” moments was when I decided to go swimming when waves were bigger than usual due to a coming storm. It was all fun until I realized I wasn’t able to swim back to the shore to where I can stand. Every time I tried, a wave knocked me further into the ocean and my leftover stamina kept dropping. I was freaking out and had no idea how to get out of there. Luckily the waves went smaller for some time and I was able to swim back to where I was able to feel the ground and pushed from there. I knew that in the worst case the coastguard or other swimmers would have jumped in but still. ~~~ enriquto It is better to swim parallel to the coast until you find an easier place to approach. Fighting the currents is exhausting. ~~~ crocal I confirm. I grew up near the Atlantic Ocean, in an area of high current. It is something that was taught to us as teenagers. ~~~ emodendroket I think knowing that and having the presence of mind to do it as you drown are two different things. ------ cpncrunch Proximity flying is just inherently dangerous. Even with power, many people have died. Sparky Imeson, who wrote the "bible" of mountain flying, died from flying too close to terrain. The strange thing is that he was actually flying back to somewhere that he had had an accident in the past (the first time he just got seriously injured, the second time he died). If you look at the accident location, there is a valley at right-angles to the valley they're flying up, possibly causing katabatic downdrafts or something similar. Steve Fossett apparently died flying too close to terrain at high density altitude with forecast winds possibly resulting in downdrafts. Both of those people were extremely experienced pilots, but they just cut the margin for error too low. The main problem seems to be that winds are somewhat unpredictable, and if you're flying too close to terrain you might not have a chance to recover if you hit a sudden downdraft. I can't imagine doing this with a powered aircraft, never mind a wingsuit. These pilots who died were 100-300ft from terrain, never mind a few feet like these unpowered wingsuit pilots. If you stall from 100ft you're dead in almost any type of aircraft as there isn't enough altitude to recover. (I don't know how many of these wingsuit deaths were caused by stalls. It seems equally likely that they just misjudged things or a small change in wind just pushed them into terrain). There's gotta be safer ways to get an adrenaline rush. ~~~ j_s > _There 's gotta be safer ways to get an adrenaline rush._ I was suprised to see no mention of VR as a potential alternative anywhere in the thread. I suppose realism still has a long way to go! ~~~ kbart I doubt VR will _ever_ replace dangerous sports. You get adrenaline rush precisely for the fact that you realize it's _dangerous_ with a real potential of getting killed or wounded and the fact that you get away with it. Sitting in an armchair with no such potential consequences might get you some thrills but it's nowhere close to the real adrenaline rush. I don't actively pursuit this feeling, but driving motorcycle regularly had put me in several close calls over the years giving an adrenaline rush I realize can not be replicated in the safer environments. ~~~ mulletbum This is why I always wish I went into game development. Maybe it can't be the same thing, but the experience can still be extraordinary. Even playing a game like Kerbal Space Program makes you feel like an astronaut. I can't imagine how good virtual reality can get. ~~~ slazaro But you get the rush from playing those games, not developing them. I mean, you do get a rush from releasing something you finished and believe in, but it's not what you're looking for, right? ~~~ mulletbum Correct, 100% right. However, I like to think of it like a musician. If I don't like music, I make music I like. So if I wanted an awesome experience from a game, I could make the game and experience I want. Of course, all that is harder to do with programming (than music), but you get the drift. ------ AmVess The most telling fact is that there is no clear bias of experience in these accidents. This simply means that the method is wrong. For sure, this is a bit like calling water wet, but people will continue to turn themselves into high performance lawn darts until they change their approach to safety. I think a lot of them don't fully appreciate how little room for error there is. They fly at around 150 MPH which is 220 feet per second. Once someone has realized there is a problem, they have gone 55 feet. Once their body and flight suit have reacted to that problem, they could easily be well past having traveled 300 feet. This is assuming perfection in body and suit. It's radically easy to blow through 600+ feet before your mid/body/suit can come up with a survival plan if you are even a little bit panicky. Quite a few deaths are from impacting terrain. By this I mean in transit terrain, meaning that they flew into something like the talus or a giant rock and didn't have enough time to avoid it. Quite a few more deaths are from inability to deploy the parachute in time. ~~~ TremendousJudge I think there are a lot of parallels with motor racing here. It was extremely dangerous on its early days, and didn't get safer when drivers got more experienced. It got safer when the cars got safer, and we still get deaths anyway (most recently in F1 the death of Jules Bianchi) ~~~ amygdyl No. I have been a serious F1 fan for closing on four decades and I must implore you and anybody else who might be tempted to discount to present values the hope that you express, to consider just how far motorsports* the physical environment and envelope of racing has been altered:. \- magnesium (not alloy!) monocoque body shells were ruled out. \- as were countless rare or highly expensive materials that created paper thin transitions in operation before failure. \- strict cockpit exit limits are enforced, 5s max to be standing on the tarmac and already have the steering wheel replaced \- pit speed limit introduced and lowered \- cornering radii universally enlarged, both by track design and track enlargement \- ditto above because high torque hybrid formula propulsion gives you more apex profiles \- driver aides have been a feature of F1 regardless of the rules, at no time has every assistant device become illegal \- hundreds billions of dollars in chassis, monocoque and aerodynamic R&D have been expended since I was born. \- delta sector split times read out on the steering wheel, feeding the driver closing dynamics and other indicators alert to track slicks and debris Those were in no particular order, but all changes to far more than likely possible with wingsuits and skydiving. Moreover these changes happened over decades. That may be too obvious. Until you next hear a water cooler cringe worthy moment when a proverbial PHB or sales jock exclaims how everything is enabled nowadays to the ultimate, by modern technology. We're all susceptible to a little bit of that.. * in my example F1, which suffered a near 30% fatality rate in years around the time of my birth, causing F1 to take a early lead, but it is not the solitary work of F1, the HANS device is a NASCAR R&D product that has saved F1 lives certainly. (I'm a rare advocate of taking much more of the American culture than would be popular, as I feel that avoidable accidents have occurred due to overreliance on the systems and that gut instincts are not on balance a negative in racing, as you may be inclined to imagine, if you are a American fan visiting your first F1 weekend. But the culture as a danger is something that F1 had to address internally, or be outlawed, very early in relative time.) Edit: phone ~~~ TremendousJudge So, you're agreeing with me? F1 got safer because the cars got safer, not because the drivers drive more safely (safety measures were pushed by drivers though) ------ dghughes I've seen this mentioned before, it seems to be the main point. > Most beginners who die appear to be making variations of the exact same > error, according to Webb. “They jump off a cliff, get flying, and for some > reason there's just this human reaction to try to hug the air like a big, > gigantic beach ball,” he explains. “By hugging air you feel as if you're > creating or catching more lift than you actually are. What ends up happening > is your suit can only grab so much air, and it starts to stall. When it > starts to stall, it loses lift, starts to drag, and then, splat. ~~~ jdietrich A lot of highly experienced jumpers are also dying, probably due to a mix of complacency, envelope-pushing and the inherent lack of margin for error in terrain flight. This point is made in the latter part of the article: > Figuring out why the best are dying confounds, saddens, and even irritates > just about everyone I’ve spoken to in the wingsuit BASE world. “It’s really > puzzling to me,” says Rich Webb. “I wish I knew, but I think it has to do > with complacency.” > Webb points out that many of the best are dying on flight lines that might > be considered either “easy” for them, or they’re lines that they’ve done > before. “It comes down to the fact that they're so comfortable in a stupidly > high-risk environment,” says Webb. “We just don't have the luxury of margins > in our sport, so at some point it catches up to you if you're not on it all > the time.” > Andy Lewis speculates, “I would say so many experienced wingsuiters are > dying because they are trying to execute jumps with very low margin for > error. Eventually when you make a mistake you hope you have room. And now > low margins are so standard in the sport. It just kills people.” ~~~ j1f4 This reminds me of Freeman Dyson's research on British Bombers during WWII -- the data showed experienced crews didn't fair better than novices, but they didn't figure out why till after the war. > Bomber Command told the crews that their chances of survival would increase > with experience, and the crews believed it. They were told, After you have > got through the first few operations, things will get better. This idea was > important for morale at a time when the fraction of crews surviving to the > end of a 30-operation tour was only about 25 percent. I subdivided the > experienced and inexperienced crews on each operation and did the analysis, > and again, the result was clear. Experience did not reduce loss rates. The > cause of losses, whatever it was, killed novice and expert crews > impartially. This result contradicted the official dogma, and the Command > never accepted it. I blame the ORS, and I blame myself in particular, for > not taking this result seriously enough. The evidence showed that the main > cause of losses was an attack that gave experienced crews no chance either > to escape or to defend themselves. If we had taken the evidence more > seriously, we might have discovered Schräge Musik in time to respond with > effective countermeasures. ... > the German pilots were highly skilled, and they hardly ever got shot down. > They carried a firing system called Schräge Musik, or “crooked music,” which > allowed them to fly underneath a bomber and fire guns upward at a 60-degree > angle. The fighter could see the bomber clearly silhouetted against the > night sky, while the bomber could not see the fighter. This system > efficiently destroyed thousands of bombers, and we did not even know that it > existed. This was the greatest failure of the ORS. We learned about Schräge > Musik too late to do anything to counter it. [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/406789/a-failure-of- intel...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/406789/a-failure-of- intelligence/) The wingsuit jumpers consider possible dangers to lie with complacency of experts on easy flights, experts envelope pushing, or novices jumping unprepared. But these factors are all so contradictory that I'm left wondering if there is a hidden risk that affects novices and experts alike. ~~~ Dwolb That's a great story. My first instinct for where to look to find things that would affect experts and beginners alike is manufacturing defects or poor suit design. I'd say also weather but that seems more likely to be highly variable and prone to skill (i.e. experts know when conditions are poor). ~~~ jacquesm I would look no further than the basic ingredients of the sport: speed, gravity, zero margin for error and over a long enough run of events you are destined for the morgue. This is not a sport, it is suicide in disguise. ~~~ dhimes One more thing: it's turned into a small industry. Some of the work in it I am certain is considered to be partly art (I am thinking of the analogy to the sailing industry in the early years of yachting). I wouldn't rule out a look to "advances" in suit design where the new engineering has an unforeseen consequence. Something the advanced guys would jump on board with, but we don't have enough data yet to determine the failures. ------ itsdevlin Active BASE jumper and wingsuit pilot here. Instructor of both. 2016 was by far and away our worst year on record. We lost newbies, heros, and damn near all levels in between. Since then, a few sites have taken a more locked-down approach where we used to be welcome, and as a community we've made progress to band together to push education and conservative decision making over 'dude that was so sketchy.' A lot of people have brought up the why - why do people do this when they know it's so dangerous? Well, that's a question that everyone needs to make for themselves, but for me it's quite simply that it's the only time I've found my mind to be quiet. It forces me to be present, assess everything in a level of detail that is unparalleled in any other time in my life, and quiet down every other distraction. Also, it's beautiful. Being in the mountains, on top of buildings, out on bridges, climbing antennae, all with some of your closest friends? It's incredible. There's absolutely nothing on the planet like that level of adventure. With all that said, it's fucking dangerous. I've managed to have a somewhat clean track record in my two years in the sport, with only two broken bones, but I have probably 20 of the people on the Base Fatality List still in my phone, four of whom I'd call great friends. It's fucking awful losing friends like that, but it's who we are. If they wouldn't have lived a life like this, would _they_ have been _them_? A little while back I had the lightning strike closest to my family, when we lost Ian. Here's his story: [https://vimeo.com/167054481](https://vimeo.com/167054481) ~~~ wazoox If you need your mind to be quiet, and to feel present to your life, there are non-life threatening ways, like mindful meditation and psychoanalysis, or maybe even working in a charity. ~~~ ProAm Or just continue to do what he's doing because it works and he likes it. Everyone gets to choose their own path... ------ NegativeK Chris McNamara, who's done some incredible climbing feats, gave a take on getting into wingsuit BASE too fast and managing to get out: [http://www.chrismcnamara.com/post/120721775716/base- jumping-...](http://www.chrismcnamara.com/post/120721775716/base-jumping- death) ------ delhanty Six hours late on this thread and I can't see anyone calling out GoPro and friends: >Five days earlier, the GoPro star Uli Emanuele, 29, died when he crashed in the Dolomites of his native country, Italy. Freedom for these people (mostly young men) to die is one thing. But part of GoPro's profits are knowingly built up by a quasi-suicide cult. That's not that different from dealing heroin. ~~~ lr You have to wonder, how many of them would be doing this (or any other "crazy" thing) if there were no cameras, no YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram Live, etc.? ~~~ JshWright I don't know how many people are doing it for the "internet fame" (my gut instinct is that it's a small percentage), but I'm sure there are many people who got into the sport in the first place because they watched it on the internet. ~~~ kogepathic _> I don't know how many people are doing it for the "internet fame" (my gut instinct is that it's a small percentage)_ I don't have any numbers, but as with anything else (e.g. Russian dash cams) I don't feel that the behaviour of people has really changed. The difference now is everyone has a camera strapped to them, and with social media it's much easier to hear about someone who died doing X than in previous decades. BASE jumping is a dangerous sport. The advent of live streaming and HD cameras small enough to strap to your helmet and hand haven't changed this, but rather raised the profile of a failure. ~~~ logfromblammo People were white-lining with their crotch-rocket motorcycles at 135 mph before cameras got small enough to mount on their helmets. They used to just be a page 3 story in the local newspaper. Now their final rides are re-posted to every "rekt" thread. Perhaps eventually, enough people will absorb the lesson that doing a dangerous thing is dangerous, and will stop trying to make the "oh shit" glands above their kidneys express their "we're about to die" juice. I have seen enough of those videos that I'm pretty sure that the way I will die is by my tiny commuter sedan being forcibly disassembled by a heavy tractor-trailer or large SUV that crosses the center line. Humans are such fragile things. Why would you intentionally do things that might get your brains splattered across a rock, when we only have another 40 to 60 years to go until you can make a backup almost as good as biology provided? ------ Havoc Well yeah. That's kind like saying more people are dying from Russian roulette...while Russian roulette is experiencing a surge in popularity. Do something stupidly dangerous enough & in large numbers and you get rows of bodybags. Sounds callous but that is the reality of it. ~~~ NegativeK That's oversimplifying or discarding the revelation. People expected wingsuit BASE to become safer with experience; practitioners didn't expect it to be a toss of the dice no matter what. ~~~ Havoc >People expected wingsuit BASE to become safer with experience; And I'm sure safety does improve with experience. They're still rolling the dice though. Some roll it with better odds than others sure but ultimately: >On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero ~~~ chias > And I'm sure safety does improve with experience. The fact that people generally seem to assume it does (but that it actually _doesn 't_) is the primary thesis of this article: "What’s more worrying about wingsuit BASE fatalities, though, is that there appears to be no consistent bias toward experience." ~~~ Havoc >(but that it actually doesn't) is the primary thesis of this article Kinda. It does improve safety in the sense that someone with zero jumps under their belt is far more likely to die than someone with some experience. That should be fairly self-evident and the fact that they even list a common beginner mistake shows this effect. That quote you've got there to me is trying to communicate that experience will improve your odds but won't save you from my "on a long enough timeline..." quote. The other thing that screw this up is that a noob and an experienced jumper won't be doing comparable things. So the experienced jumper is safer, but is also doing substantially more dangerous stuff. Measuring deaths vs experience doesn't capture that. ------ cvsh Probably because it's the most dangerous thing you can do short of actually attempting suicide ~~~ damnfine Bet its even closer than you think. Nobody I know who does BASE is still alive. Some quit, others died. Everyone just kind of expects to die doing it. Blue skies, black death. ~~~ eternalcode Why is it not banned? ~~~ base698 It is in the land of the free. It's generally not banned in Europe, so most BASE jumpers who are active spend at least a few weeks a year there. About 10 to 20 die world wide in about a population of 1000 or so active jumpers. It can be done relatively safely but the group isn't big enough to regulate effectively and most BASE jumpers are hostile to anyone mentioning the idea. ~~~ sundvor How many would die of other causes, such as .. car crashes. ~~~ Spooky23 Probably a much smaller numbers. Cars are engineered to protect all but the most reckless and negligent from death. ~~~ Zigurd Inside the car. Globally about half of road deaths are outside the vehicle. ------ Raphmedia Even birds and insects make mistakes. They spend most of their lives flying and still hit trees or windows and die. You can't expect a big monkey to stick wings on their body and not die at some point. ------ WalterBright Flying is not natural for humans. Our instincts are wrong, and our senses misinform us. This is well known among pilots, and why one has to fly regularly to keep the license, and why a large part of pilot training focuses on trusting the instruments rather than your body. ~~~ base698 Pilot training only focuses on instruments during IFR training. Private pilot and most VFR is done without emphasis on instruments. Aerobatics rely on senses and no instruments. Source: Skydiver, BASE jumper, paraglider, aerobatic airplane pilot, private pilot land and sea. ~~~ WalterBright > Aerobatics rely on senses and no instruments. But I bet you check the airspeed and altitude before doing any maneuvers that'll take you near the ground. I've seen the videos of pilots at airshows pulling out of a dive and having not quite enough altitude to do it. Also, stall recovery is well known to be something that runs counter to every natural instinct a person has. ~~~ loup-vaillant There's a difference between using one's own senses and using one's own _instincts_. Stall recovery is easily done with one's own senses (sight, hearing, and proprioception), even though the correct response is counter- intuitive. Looking at the instruments would even be a bad idea when you stall, because you'd lose time which you could use to save your life. I even know of a sailplane instructor that turn the instruments _off_ for the student (not for himself, though), so the student can learn to read his own sensory information correctly before relying on instruments. ------ crispytx Wingsuit pilot & programmer here. The reason Wingsuit BASE Jumpers keep dying is that you shouldn't jump your wingsuit off a @#$%ing mountain. Please stick to the planes and the helicopters that you're used to. ~~~ kevin_thibedeau Its safer than regular base jumping provided you don't try to strafe tree and hilltops and cliffsides. These jumpers are trying to do ever riskier stunts all for the clicks. ~~~ c0nducktr I don't think it's all for the clicks, if it's like any other dangerous sport/hobby. It's for the rush you get doing it. The feel of being right on the edge. It's an addictive feeling, and it can trick you, because you know it's dangerous but you're always come out of it fine, great even, until you don't. ~~~ benjaminRRR This is a very good point. Unlike other sports - when you push you can be hurt badly, but ultimately learn from your mistake, proximity wingsuit is one- mistake-one-kill. ~~~ ehnto That's how motorcycle accidents were explained to me. It is perfectly fine until it isn't, because there is so little room for error that it can only be fine or a crash. That was for motorcycles where accidents are survivable and things are much more in your control. For low wingsuit flying those last two points are both questionable. ------ lord_jim Came across this Wikipedia list of wingsuit fatalities: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatalities_due_to_wi...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatalities_due_to_wingsuit_flying) The past few years is pretty sobering, especially given that most of these guys were experts and clearly knew their stuff ~~~ personlurking This one seems a bit more comprehensive [http://base-jumping.eu/base-jumping- fatality-list/](http://base-jumping.eu/base-jumping-fatality-list/) ------ nkrisc Reading through I surprised to learn that both novices and veterans of the sport are dying. I suppose that's just how dangerous it is. As for myself, while I'm sure these are incredible experiences, there are other amazing things I can experience in life that aren't nearly as deadly. I'll stick with those and optimize for total volume of as incredible life experiences as is possible before I (hopefully) die of natural causes at an old age. Having a kid on the way changes my perspective as well. ------ siteshwar Carl Boenish, who is considered father of modern base jumping, died while performing a base jump next day after marking his name in Guinness World Records. 'Sunshine Superman'[1] a documentary made on his life and death is worth watching. [1] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1322313/?ref_=nv_sr_1](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1322313/?ref_=nv_sr_1) ------ ucaetano > We’re talking about real, human-powered flight—or, at least as close as > humanity has ever come to it. Apparently the author hasn't heard about all the human powered flight initiatives, including crossing the English Channel: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human- powered_aircraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-powered_aircraft) ~~~ perilunar Yeah, not human-powered at all. Gravity powered, like any other glider. ------ honestoHeminway There are just to many factors you do not controll, especially if you fly close to terrain. That tree that was upright yesterday, might have dropped. The birds that where far away in the morning, might get in your way. The little pond on the way, that was just mud, is dryed dust today swirling up. Wind drafts coming and going. ------ levi_n I plotted the total BASE + wingsuit deaths since inception: [http://i.imgur.com/BdlUrFK.png](http://i.imgur.com/BdlUrFK.png) * Note that the BFL has some errors in it's dates, which account for the downward trend in 1993 and 2000 ------ emodendroket > Wingsuiters are striking apple-size targets from a mile away. And they’re > flying mere inches above, around, and sometimes even through terrain that’s > barely wider than their own outstretched arms. Well, seems like they've answered their own question. ------ pzs Previous discussion on this article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12418937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12418937) ------ coldtea > _In researching 2016’s dramatic rise in BASE jumping deaths, I was almost > unable to keep up with the pace with which people were dying._ Perhaps something to do with the increased popularity of social media and action cameras -- thus attracting a large body of non-seriously committed, in it for the views, darwin award nominees? ~~~ emodendroket This is dismissed later in the article. ------ m3kw9 Numbers and percentage can be deceiving. Also another reason if the percentage is increasing is that there is more of a urge to try to copy what daredevils do on YouTube, maybe they make it look easy. Or they want to create highlight videos themselves but highlights are the tricky stuff others haven’t done. ------ DrScump A friend of mine died on the Stanislaus before New Melones Dam was built (and not even in a rapid). ------ solidsnack9000 > Wingsuit skydiving has virtually zero fatalities... Virtually zero or really zero? ~~~ base698 Occasionally a single person will die in a year. As opposed to almost 20 fatalities in a much smaller population of wingsuit BASE jumpers every year. ------ eighthnate A 2016 article? A dangerous sport that rapidly grew in popularity in recent years has increases in death? What do you expect? ------ tootie Extreme sports like this just feel so dumb. Why are you risking your life for a momentary thrill? You'd get a better rush and be safer taking heroin. ~~~ base698 It's a challenge mentally? Overcome fear see different places, have different experiences? I've been skydiving and base jumping longer than I've not been and it's led me to some of the most rewarding experiences of my life. ~~~ corporateslave2 But those experiences are just self induced near death experiences. It's an illusion of meaning ~~~ danielharrison Just like sitting in a chair all your life and eating fast food until you actually have a real self induced death experience , sans adrenaline. ------ dlevi A ------ perilunar \- because they're going too fast when they hit the ground? \- because their sink rate is too high, and gets worse when they stall? \- because 3:1 is a lousy glide angle? \- because their wings are too small? ~~~ drdrey Regular BASE jumpers perform worse on all these metrics but don't die as much. All these metrics apply the same to skydiving wingsuit jumpers but they don't die as much. The real problem is that flying closer to things leads to more likes. ------ 659087 HN attempts to sound authoritative on yet another subject it doesn't understand. A few people pretend to be skydivers after studying the wikipedia entry about the sport, but give themselves away through improper terminology. ~~~ base698 I have a three digit BASE number! I'm legit! I swear! ~~~ 659087 I was going to add: "...one actual BASE jumper shows up", but was suffering temporary memory loss after being exposed to the cringeworthy material in the rest of the thread.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Testimony on HB552, to Legalize Bitcoin for Payments of Taxes and Fees - kauffj http://blog.lbry.io/testimony-to-subcommittee-on-hb552-to-legalize-bitcoin-for-payments-of-taxes-and-fees/ ====== umeshunni While I agree with nearly everything he says in that testimony, being less flippant/hyperbolic and more factual might have helped.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Is there room for a new ‘curated’ search engine? - keiferski Google results seem to be getting progressively worse, and even if they aren’t, there are too many relevant websites to accurately display on a single search results page. It seems to me that a return to the original Yahoo model might actually have a place in 2019. ====== RickS Is part of what makes google less useful their attempt to "curate"? It's worth thinking about what constitutes curation. I would say that adapting results towards expected customer preferences (eg giving pet owners and programmers different results for "getting started with python") is curation. Perhaps more controversially, so too is the pruning of results at all – if most of what I'm searching for is spam/malware, then so be it. Search engines are already very curated, IMO. There's room to differentiate by choosing _NOT_ to curate. I would be curious to use a search engine that used nothing but PageRank circa ~2006. Pedantically, any algorithm/ranking/weighting system is unavoidably curatory by design. But to answer what I think you mean, yes, I think there's room for opinionated search engines for many values of "opinionated". Another way to think of these might be "contexts" that you apply overtop of a search engine, and perform many searches within that context. For example, when I'm searching for front end things, I wish google were smart enough to time-scope my searches dynamically using knowledge I don't have. I search for Mongoose operations and get top results from 2011 saying X doesn't exist, but it was added in 2016. I would like to see only results from when the thing I wanted existed. But only ever searching the last two years _all the time_ costs results that would be helpful in other times. When searching for device repair instructions, I wish the engine were able to adopt my estimations about sites that aggregate forum replies or repair instructions in automated ways to gather clicks, and either banish them or loudly mark them. I'm not sure how to do this with major traction, or without being eaten by google, but "ecosystem of many opinionated and accurate search contexts" feels like it would add value to the world. ------ shakna Curation is unlikely to be helpful when it comes to a search engine of any decent size, in my opinion. However, I agree Google's results are getting worse, but I think that is more a result of the way they weight results, and personalize them. Covering personalization - I've yet to see it work effectively for a large audience. It does drive certain markets, but by whales rather than everyone. So most people get things badly, and a few are driven towards a certain goalpoint, in Google's case adverts, where they tend to make clicks or purchases of the intended partners. On weighting results - Google seems to have stopped weighting results for relevance a long time ago. They seem to prioritise things differently now. Exactly how I'm not sure, but it does seem to include Recent Events, using technology Google has a vested interest in, and Partners, and all those get addressed before relevancy. If you can solve the relevancy problem (which is huge, from above, Recent does not always mean Relevant, but it can), then you can certainly attract the technological crowd. Google seems to have aimed their search engine at popular events, news and social media. Where would you aim your search engine? ------ ian0 For sure. I think there is both demand and it's possible to scale it. We have examples of amazingly successful group curation at scale with wikipedia, stackoverflow etc. We also have forum platforms that successfully curate information, Reddit, HN etc (which many people use to find better recommendations than Google). However, the value in curation is only on a particular subset of queries. Those where you want to discover information and have some introductory terms to go on ("Motorbike Safety", "Analytics SAAS", "Buying a Fridge" etc). What youre looking for is an expert in a niche area to point you in the right direction. Curation is very beneficial here. The second type of query, where you are looking for a specific piece of information (specific business, specific book review, weird fact) etc Google already does fine on. And curation wont help (nor will it scale on such precise info). ------ sebst Some thoughts: \- If there are too many relevant websites to display on one page, search vs. manual directory does not really make a difference. \- The curated model was long kept up by DMOZ, which had an army of volunteer editors but eventually shut down. Some editors took over and built curlie.org, but there is no innovation since DMOZ (which itself had no innovation) \- Curation is a big topic nowadays. Pinterest for example is based on that idea. However, things might be a bit more decentralised these days. I am just thinking about the awsome-* lists on GitHub. \- Manual directories may fail build a "searchable" taxonomy. I am searching maybe for a technical support company specialised in that product, located in this city, offering low rates. This is an easy example, but there are tougher ones. General purpose information retrieval (like Google does) might be a better fit for such problems than prebuilt taxonomies. \- Based on the last two points, curation might be more successful in small topics rather than in a Yahoo-like all-topics setting. ~~~ Something1234 Pinterest is a completely parasitic website that doesn't provide backlinks to content, and hides results from google search. No attribution and no original content. That is completely disgusting to me. There is no way to get to the original post. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if they were hotlinking too. ------ stevenicr I think there is room for 30 - 50 curated niche search engines - done similar but different then the old dmoz and yahoo. In so many ways google is failing many niches that it once served well. I have been doodling ideas on how to do some of those niches better, like adult. ------ new_guy I'd say so. Google is a joke, it doesn't give relevant results anymore and limits itself solely to 'pop culture' results. There needs to be 'contextual search', i.e look at your previous queries and factor that into your current search. ~~~ elamje I don't work at Google, but considering the amount of research scientists on the search team and the troves of data they have on users, I think they already use contextual data quite heavily. Anecdotally, if you type a google search for something along the lines of spring break in Florida, then search Google Flights, it auto-populates the dates of Spring Break into the search. ~~~ dahdum I see this behavior constantly in autocomplete. Search for [flights to london], then start typing [things to do] and the first suggestion will be [things to do in london]. ------ exlurker I really want one for personal webpages/projects only. Oh, and forums. ------ elamje This might be close to what you are looking for. Human Curated is their goal - [https://find.xyz/about](https://find.xyz/about) ------ codegeek Curated and Niche. Google is still great for general searches in my opinion but when I need a drill down level of search that can only happen with curation, we have a gap there. ------ AnimalMuppet The problem is that there is no way that curated can scale (at least, I don't see one). As the web has grown, curated becomes less and less possible. ------ screye My go-to tends to be site:reddit.com as a filter for most search queries. Works pretty well in most cases. ------ maddyindia I'm planning to create one , perhaps more of an "information engine" rather .	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mars – a tensor-based unified framework for large-scale data computation - jonbaer https://docs.mars-project.io/en/latest/ ====== silicaroach Is this intended as a competitor to Dask?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Webcam + Favicon = Face-icon - paulkaplan http://paulkaplan.me/Experiments/Favicon/favicon.html ====== steeve Nice idea, but in Chrome when you activate WebRTC, the favicon will blink with a "recording" icon, ruining the effect. ~~~ paulkaplan I don't think so, it works fine for me. ~~~ cleverjake Im seeing the same issue on 26.0.1410.3 Mac Chrome ~~~ paulkaplan I'm on 24.0.1312.57 and it is working fine, but it says I'm up to date, is that a dev build or something? ~~~ cleverjake Im not at that computer now, but according to <http://omahaproxy.appspot.com/> it is the OS X dev build.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
FirePython: Firebug for Python - bdotdub http://github.com/darwin/firepython/tree/master ====== tlrobinson Why does it need to be a Firebug plugin? If it were just JavaScript it could work in any browser. ~~~ Erwin It's mostly about sending additional headers with the response which your Firebug-plugin plugin interprets and displays in its console. There are similar plugins for other languages, see e.g. <http://www.firephp.org/> (that has does a few things that I believe FP does not, like let you emit pretty tables) I don't believe you can get access to headers in Javascript so if you wanted to smuggle your log messages out that way you'd have to set some giant cookies or the addon would have to intrude on the rendered page and modify it -- these plugins do not. This has also the advantage of embedding those log messages in non-HTML content, e.g. a JSON AJAX respnose or a generated image. ------ DenisM Can anyone explain what it does? I spent 5 minutes reading the link but I'm still confused. Thanks. ------ marram Very useful. Thank you for writing/posting it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Concurrent Wifi Users - jftuga https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YnGlV0MnFg ====== jftuga This shows wifi user locations throughout a day with each room having one AP. Devices consists of laptops, tablets and phones using various 802.11 wireless standards. Data was collected throughout the day from a pair of Cisco 2504 WLAN controllers. The controllers were queried about once per minute and the usage was saved to a CSV file. I then wrote an R script to transform each sample into it's own PNG graph. I used ffmpeg to merge all of the PNG files into a 1080p MP4 video.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Coverity Scan Update - fcambus https://community.synopsys.com/s/article/Coverity-Scan-Update ====== danielhochman Coverity Scan regularly goes down for hours or days. In February of 2018 it was down for over a month with no word or ETA on when it would be fixed. I hadn't thought about it since then (we discontinued use), but researching it now they released a statement saying that it was hacked. There was not a single status update during the outage. [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/19/coverity_scan_crypt...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/19/coverity_scan_cryptomining/) ------ kstrauser I wonder who the hosting provider was. I'm not seeing much in the news about one that "unexpectedly ceased operations", just the expected background news of scattered outages. ~~~ westi Based on DNS history for the domain it looks like it was [https://twitter.com/nephoscale](https://twitter.com/nephoscale) \| [http://nephoscale.com/](http://nephoscale.com/) ~~~ kstrauser Wild! I wonder why they picked a host that I'd literally never heard of before this moment? Not that I claim encyclopedic knowledge of virtual hosting providers, but still. ~~~ dsl Coverity was an acquisition. The hosting company was probably ran by a friend of the founders (both seem to be based in the bay area). ------ sanxiyn Coverity is really good. It is a pity some of its advances, effective in practice but not really "publishable", will forever remain as proprietary secret. Source: I worked on static code analysis product and we extensively black-box tested Coverity. ~~~ tacostakohashi What kind of advances are you thinking of? As best I can tell, most of the warnings are either things that can be figured out for a single translation unit and (some) compilers will eventually incorporate as warnings, or things that can only be figured out by analyzing / linking across many translation units - which a compiler can't do, but the actual "advance" is simple enough if you have all the function definitions to hand. ~~~ sanxiyn Most advances are about filtering false positives. If you do "simple" interprocedural analysis and dump the result you will find lots of bugs together with lots of false positives and you can't sell that. In other words, all the advances are in warnings you don't see. Yes, all Coverity warnings you see, are simple. I agree. Quoting from [https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/2/69354-a-few-billion- li...](https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/2/69354-a-few-billion-lines-of- code-later/fulltext) > Since the analysis that suppresses false positives is invisible (it removes > error messages rather than generates them) its sophistication has scaled far > beyond what our research system did. On the other hand, the commercial > Coverity product, despite its improvements, lags behind the research system > in some ways because it had to drop checkers or techniques that demand too > much sophistication on the part of the user. ~~~ jetru :) Cool that you recognize that. This is correct. Coverity does a bunch of specific analyses designed to eliminate False positives. This includes analysis to determine which data states are not possible for a given code path, and doesn't report those specific issues. This also works using data across function calls. For C/C++/C#, Coverity has by far the lowest false positive rates, which make it probably the best in class for those languages. Disclosure: I used to work at Coverity. ~~~ sanxiyn Fascinating! The specific example you mentioned sounds publishable, any idea? I mean, I am just curious, I no longer work on this. I now have quite different perspective wrt false positives; that false positive rate is not important. It's all about perspectives. Name the tool bug search engine instead of bug finding tool. You rarely look beyond the first page of search engine result. Develop a ranking algorithm such that all alarms in the first page is relevant. You can use any probabilistic voodoo to rank. Etc. I don't know whether this can work. But I think it's worth a try. ~~~ tacostakohashi I think the takeaway here is that Coverity have just made a (clever) business decision to eliminate false positives, so that (nearly) 100% of their defects are "correct". It's quite possible that there are real defects that they _don 't_ show because their confidence is less than 100%. ~~~ sanxiyn No, not really. "false positives are the enemy" (or at least, in my alternative model, relevancy) becomes _glaringly obvious_ for anyone who tried this at scale. The question is how to reduce false positives (or improve relevancy). The part that "real defects not shown" exist is called unsoundness and pretty much everybody now agrees you should be unsound. (Or being sound is a different market.) Of course, this is not obvious to people who haven't tried, so it is reported over and over and over. The most recently, from Google. Lessons from Building Static Analysis Tools at Google (2018). [https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/4/226371-lessons-from- bu...](https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/4/226371-lessons-from-building- static-analysis-tools-at-google/fulltext) I mean, I could have told them. Select quotes: > Unlike compile-time checks, analysis results shown during code review are > allowed to include up to 10% effective false positives. IMPORTANT NOTE: 10% effective false positives means much less than 10% false positives! In above quote, Google defines true bugs marked as not-a-bug by a developer as effectively false positives. If what you say is true, but users misunderstand, it doesn't count. ------ walterbell Has anyone tried LGTM / Semmle QL for automated code review? They claim 100K OSS projects are using the service. It's a bit hard to find technical information on the product, but they have found CVEs in mainstream products, including iOS. [https://lgtm.com](https://lgtm.com) & [https://semmle.com/ql](https://semmle.com/ql) ~~~ spatulon I work on C/C++ analysis at Semmle, and am happy to answer any questions you might have. (We also support C#, Java, JavaScript, Python... and Cobol!) We have a few high-profile projects using our automated code review (marketing people tell me I'm not allowed to call it 'PR integration' any more). One example is on the AMP Project, where we caught a regex injection vulnerability in a PR before a human looked at it: [https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/pull/13060](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/pull/13060) Our default analysis has found a few other vulnerabilities (remote buffer overflows due to misuse of snprintf in rsyslog and Icecast spring to mind) but, honestly, I think our strength lies in the fact that you can write custom queries that find bugs specific to a single codebase's foibles. For example, my first ever CVE was for a vulnerability in ChakraCore. Google Project Zero found the original bug - type confusion caused by failure to check a flag indicating that the last element of a list should be cast to a different type - but we wrote a query to verify that code accessing that particular list always checked the flag. So when some new code got introduced with the same bug, we noticed as soon as we re-ran the query on the new commit. ~~~ walterbell _> We also support C#, Java, JavaScript, Python... and Cobol!)_ Where do these rank in chances of future support? - Go - Rust - Lua - Swift - Haskell ~~~ samlanning Go support is currently in development, so very likely :) As for the other languages there, there are no plans currently on the roadmap for 2019 to add any of them. However if this is something that particularly interests you, we'd encourage you to apply for a job and note that you'd like to add support for a particular language :) ------ sunyc I honestly thought it is gone! All links are dead, and synopsis.com’s big Corp style website isn’t helping one bit. ------ joshstrange > Coverity Scan is a free static code analysis tool for Java, C, C++, C# and > JavaScript. It analyzes every line of code and potential execution path and > produces a list of potential code defects. There we go, I had no clue what this even was. Do a lot of people here use it? ~~~ radicalbyte Coverity have one of the best static analyzers for C++ and CSharp. Not a surprise considering they have had* ex-Microsoft compiler engineers such as Eric Lippert working for them. I understand from speaking to C++ engineers who have extensive experience in embedded / industrial applications that Coverity is used extensively there. Personally I've never seen the need to apply it to CSharp projects because the language is naturally safer than C++ and you get a lot of "bang for the buck" by using the tools built into Visual Studio and from JetBrains. * He works at Facebook now :facepalm: ------ rurban Wouldn't it be great if professional websites will someday get to the level of non-professional websites? E.g. by giving this announcement page a proper title: "Coverity Scan Outage". Update is a change, this is an outage.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Resource Revocation in Apache Mesos (2012) [pdf] - ch http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~kubitron/courses/cs262a-F12/projects/reports/project9_report_ver4.pdf ====== haosdent This looks like inverse offer in Mesos [https://mesosphere.com/blog/2015/10/07/mesos-inverse- offers/](https://mesosphere.com/blog/2015/10/07/mesos-inverse-offers/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Your Résumé Won't Get You Hired - tghw http://hicks-wright.net/blog/your-resume-wont-get-you-hired/ ====== jusob In my experience in hiring, this is the opposite: we don't get may cover letters (if any), and never require one. There are not too many reason a candidate wants the job: more money, bad work environment at the previous/current company, or unemployed (or soon to be). ~~~ russell The article is right. The cover letter gives you a chance to jump out from the resume format and do some marketing for yourself. I accidentally did A/B testing on my cover letter a few years back. I wasnt getting much response with a dry cover letter, so I rewrote it with a more informal upbeat tone adding humor and even threw in snippets of song lyrics (I kid you not). Immediately the response doubled. One thing it did was engage the front line screeners and HR types. If you dont get by them you dont get anywhere. It also gave me a personality that people could remember. ~~~ webignition I couldn't agree more. Presenting your personality is precisely why I carefully write a friendly, intriguing and upbeat cover letter for each and every job. You can't present a culture fit better than by presenting your personality. I once went to Dublin for a weekend with the sole intention of eating a banana. I returned with a girl to whom I proposed whilst in Dublin and who has now been my wife for over five years. That says more about me, outside of my skill set and experience, than my CV ever could and works wonders for making me stand out, as well as intriguing whoever may be reading my application. ~~~ sedachv "I once went to Dublin for a weekend with the sole intention of eating a banana. I returned with a girl to whom I proposed whilst in Dublin and who has now been my wife for over five years." That is the best thing I have heard in a long time. I can't stop laughing. ------ zach Of course not, that's why I send a complimentary desk calendar. It has color pictures of me in various worldwide locales (thank you, Photoshop) and notes important days, like my birthday and when HR should schedule an interview with me. Then there's always the inflatable sword with my name on it. Nobody can resist an inflatable sword! ------ iigs Counterpoint: In my experience as an interviewer (for peer positions) there's no benefit. It's vaguely amusing to read people imagine what the position might be like and try to spin it to sound like what they want to do, or to hear them talk about changing the world or getting all excited about our industry. It seems like if you're not a principal in a business (i.e. a YC hacker) you're a cog in a business: your primary task is to do what your boss wants you to do. I'd rather see professionalism that results in being good at your job (and going home at the end of the day) than hell bent on some quest to find life satisfaction at work. This topic has blown through a couple times in the past few weeks and there's definitely been a lot of "YOU MUST DO THIS", "it doesn't matter", but I still don't have a feel for how as an candidate it might help me, and I find rationalizing my desire to do geek stuff as a passion for working at a specific company _very_ disingenuous. If I'm finding positions on monster.com, I'm looking because I want a different job, not because I'm passionate about improving peoples lives with $company_brand widgets. Maybe employers that are expecting these are getting their resumes from elsewhere? ------ alexgartrell If you're handing your resume to an HR person, cover letters are good to differentiate yourself from everyone else. If it's a tech person, cover letters can be good if they talk about amazing stuff you've done that doesn't fit into a Resume. (I want to work for your company because your line of software is similar to many of my projects [list]) ~~~ mustpax While I agree with you about cover letters and HR people, I think most amazing stuff should fit in a resume. I’ve definitely included relevant academic projects in my resume and have gotten great traction from them. Generally speaking, if it’s important and relevant to your career, and you can express the subject in a concise bullet-point way, I say put it in. You still have to remember to keep the resume short, but including unconventional yet amazing stuff isn’t half bad. ------ qeorge Computer people hate cover letters because they're redundant, and so they annoy people like us. But this can't be stressed enough: _HR people aren't computer people, even at software companies._ Anecdotal evidence: just last week a friend in HR at RedHat told me very matter-of-factly, "our intranet is a wiki!" She's a sweet girl, and very smart in her own field, but is nothing like your potential co-workers. ~~~ gecko tghw works at Fog Creek, as do I. We're both software developers. Here's the thing: your cover letter (hopefully) isn't redundant. If you want to think of it in computer terms: your résumé is data; your cover letter is the function through which to view the data. Your résumé may say that you only have experience working with VBScript. Your cover may tell us that you do that, but you hate it, so secretly, in your spare time, you pretend to be a fellow named _why, and write your own languages. Conversely, your résumé may be a shotgun approach to skills, but your cover letter sounds about as excited about coding as I personally am about doing my taxes. In neither case is the cover truly redundant; even if, in terms of raw data, your cover letter _is_ redundant, it tells me more about you than your résumé ever could hope to. I'd challenge you that, if there's a redundancy, it's the opposite of what you're positing: the résumé is for HR to tick crap off in a spreadsheet; the cover letter is for me as a person to learn who the hell you actually are. ~~~ skorgu Wouldn't the interview traditionally fulfill those criteria? ~~~ tghw The problem is, interviews cost money. We fly every candidate in for a day of interviews and put them up in a nice Manhattan hotel. And that's the cheap part. The expensive part is taking developers' time to actually do the interview. So while the interview most certainly looks at those sorts of things, we try to interview only when we're confident that a candidate has the potential to actually get the job. ------ noelchurchill In my experience the resume has been more of a formality than anything else. I've always been able to get jobs by being referred by a mutual friend/work associate. ~~~ frossie That's all very well if you are being headhunted into a company with no formal HR rules. We, for example, are a reasonably cool place to work at but our paymaster is an Equal Opportunities employer. That means we have to be very very strict about the hiring process and even in situations where we know and have solicited an applicant, s/he _still_ has to be graded according to fair and consistent rules like all other applicants. The original article was correct: an employer typically asks for 6-9 things in a job ad; some will be obvious directly from your resume (eg. "10 years experience in C"); all others should be dealt with in a cover letter. For example if the employer asks for "MacOS X experience" and you haven't got any in your resume, a cover letter that says "while I do not have much direct experience with MacOS X, I have programmed for many years on similar POSIX compliant environments such as FreeBSD and I am confident I would quickly be productive in the MacOS X environment". ------ pmichaud Cover letters are really only useful when you're acquainted with the company well enough to actually want to work with them (but not well enough to just call up and say hi). It's more commonly just fluff: > I want to work for Acme Corp because RocketSled 2.0 is exciting... Blah, blah, blah. If you're hiring for acme corp, just accept the acme resumes. If you're hiring for somewhere neat, then why not dig into your network and make the cover letter AND the resume unnecessary? ~~~ tghw Why would you apply to a company you didn't know well enough to want to work at? You should have some reason you're applying to the company. Think about it this way: if you're already an employee of the company and someone applies who doesn't really want to work there, and HR lets them through, would you want to work with them? I wouldn't. But even if you can't write a good "I want to work and Foobar Inc." paragraph, the cover letter gives you a chance to talk about all the stuff you do on the side, to show how much you love making software. Personally, I would much rather work for a company that hires people who love working there than one that hires people just because they know a guy who knows a guy. ~~~ iigs Reasons why I'm currently looking for a new job: 1) I'm looking to change locations, half way across the USA 2) I've been in my current position for nearly five years, and am ready for a change: 2a) In my chosen trade (being a unix sysadmin) you often get tremendous latitude in selecting tech, tools, and tasks, but cross pollinating with the technology stack at other companies gives you answers to questions you didn't even know you had and makes you a better employee for it. 2b) I'm a disbeliever in the "you've got to get out by the time you're forty" age discrimination stuff. I have, however, seen a lot of people, both young and old, that have spent long enough in one industry that they were not hireable for a position in mine because they'd spent so long in a single frame of mind that they fell flat on their face after several attempts to coax them through design/architecture questions. _Think about it this way: if you're already an employee of the company and someone applies who doesn't really want to work there, and HR lets them through, would you want to work with them? I wouldn't._ Sure, if someone actively doesn't want the position they applied for they should have told the recruiter "thanks but no thanks", but, frankly, if I find a job I'm interested in, the interview is _mutual_ : while you're determining if I can reboot routers with style and grace, I'm determining if you're a sweat shop, if my potential teammates are idiots, and if my future boss is a jerk. In my opinion it's the employer's job to sell _me_ on why I want to work in that industry, rather than the other way around. ~~~ Tsagadai Ever tried dropping your age from your resume? There is no requirement to put it on. If you get into the interview and the interviewer has an, "Oh, you're not what we're after" moment you know why. In this country that is grounds alone to sue so most companies will give you a decent interview, at the very least. ~~~ iigs Actually I'm currently in the prime of my hiring age, and it's not listed at all, but it's very easy to infer, particularly if an individual has dated their college history (I honestly don't recall if I did or not). ~~~ mgenzel And if you don't 'date' it, it's a flag to the person who reads your resume anyway, that you're old (which is why you would do that). It's tough. ------ xenophanes bad article. talks about 7 criteria, and has lots of numbers, but doesn't tell us what they are. lacking meat. ~~~ tedunangst <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/SortingResumes.html> ------ rokhayakebe Same goes for contract gigs/sales/partnership inquiries. I noticed more than 60% of professionals you approach with a short (under 8 lines including salutations), tailored email with or without a portfolio/resume will email back and ask for more information. Throw a resume alone and you are not very likely to capture the guy/gal's attention. Be different. ------ staunch I just focus on phone screening really heavily. Anyone with relevant experience on their resume gets called. Any of those that seem really good are asked to come in. The best person is made an offer, if they decline, the second best is made an offer. Very few "bad" candidates make it passed the phone screen, so little time is wasted. Works great. ~~~ trapper I agree, it's much faster. When hiring for a developer position I usually ask "what's the most recent scientific paper you have read" and ask them to discuss it. Extra credit is given if it's in a different field than computer science. I have found this a very reliable way to weed out candidates who can talk the talk but really are just winging it. ------ phugoid It would be more relevant if everyone here commenting would indicate whether they are personally involved in the hiring process, and in what role. Otherwise, we may as well be discussing the purchase of a new car with folks who have never and will never buy one. Their perspective must be discounted accordingly. I am not involved in hiring. But I sure wish the companies I apply to were like Fog Creek; openly publishing their hiring philosophy and requirements check-list. ------ christopherdone I have seen my coworkers viewing applications... many were discarded outright because of stupid spelling errors or poor grammar, or no letter at all. Applicants whose work and homepage weren't available or were scarce lead to the (inductive) conclusion that the applicant was crap. My last two job interviews lead to being hired, and my approach is generally: (1) be very picky about which company I apply to; (2) go the company's web site to get a history, which is important for: (3) write an interesting letter saying what you like about the company, and give attachments and links to things that they can go take a look at, and (4) to actually provide some critique of the work the company has done, and provide solutions. Anyone can point out mistakes; we need someone who solves problems, like The Wolf. Also, in reference to language skills, I like a quote by Dijkstra: “Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.” ------ abyssknight Yes, yes it will. The job I hold now, the interview process went as such: * Phone interview with resource manager. "So, are you interested in working at such and such doing Coldfusion and .NET?" * Phone interview with hiring manager. "Do you know Coldfusion and Perl? What have you worked on?" * Had an open interview session with another part of the company. Explained this to the hiring manager. I was told I would hear something the following week. * Offer letter arrived on Monday. It really doesn't get much smoother than that. Not once did I have to defend things on my resume, make up answers to crazy questions, or jump through silly hoops. They wanted someone who could do the job, and I could. So they hired me. ------ patcito As programmer, something that might help more than a cover letter or a résumé is open source code you wrote. ~~~ phugoid I want to believe that, but assume that the number of applicants is a hundred- fold more than the number of interesting positions available. You need to survive that first sift through the pile, especially if it's done by non-techies. ------ eli If I'm looking through 100 emailed resumes, your cover letter (which should be in the body of the email) is an advertisement for you. It should give me a reason to bother opening your resume. ~~~ iigs You have 100 resumes to read and you're reading the long-form bodies of emails? Why? I've always had the benefit of a HR department to do that screening but I'd think I'd read the resumes first and then go back and follow up and read the emails they sent. ~~~ eli HR department? At a startup? ------ dpnewman i do think cover letters are important, but would emphasize they should employ a less is more approach. just enough to show a "voice", a persona -- humanizing the interaction. perhaps pointing out 1 or 2 key things that might show in an understated way that you "get" something that might be of value to the employer, or highlights something about your unique value. but don't overdo it. too much about why you want to work at this company is gonna start to smell a bit. ------ vaksel Resumes are pretty useless, half the stuff people write is made up on the spot, the other half is exaggerated beyond belief. ------ jpcx01 I don't care about a resume or a cover letter. Show me an interesting github profile and I'll recommend you for hire. ------ michaelawill I always thought the point of a resume was to get you an interview. Then it's your job to get yourself hired. ------ known Hiring is Obsolete <http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html> ------ Ardit20 I thought a cover letter was a prerequisite. Anyone can put a CV together and email it to 1000 companies, but to write a cover letter for each company just shows you actually know what you are applying for to start with. ~~~ alain94040 If you email your resume to 1000 companies, you've already lost the game before it starts! This is no way to find a good job. Plus, you already know it intuititvely, when it happens to you, you call it spam. As a hiring manager for many years, I barely took notice of all the e-mails sent to jobs@mycompany.com. But the ones sent personally to me, from someone who has some connection (works for a competitor, uses our products, etc...) would get first class treatment. I know it's tought out there for new grads though, because what I describe kind of requires some experience (read [http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/05/13/being-a-new-cs- grad-...](http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/05/13/being-a-new-cs-grad-in-this- economy-sucks/) for more advice on that topic)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How much equity for first employee? - Murkin Hey guys,<p>Was wondering if there are any rules of thumb for equity share of first employee(s).<p>Our specific scenario:<p><pre><code> Two founders with track record (sold companies in the past). Have great connections. Already raised seed money. </code></pre> The first employee is going to be tech and in charge of building the product. (one or two more to follow soon).<p>What would be a reasonable equity share ? (If employee also gets about 1/2 market salary). ====== morisy A friend of mine was actually in almost the _exact_ same situation recently. He was offered 8%, vested over four years, plus about a quarter salary with promise of full salary (or at least full-er salary) on a second funding around. For the record, he turned the offer down. He'd been hoping for 20%, but also wouldn't have taken the position if he'd been offered 50% because he just wasn't passionate about the startup after a two-month trial period.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to learn anything you need about medium in 7 minutes - despinaexad https://medium.com/@Xrysomalloysa/how-to-learn-anything-you-need-about-medium-in-7-minutes-c25e9ebe30fc ====== masonic This article is perfectly representative of _Medium_ content. ~~~ grzm Apparently the author (based on the username and author name) has started submitting their own medium posts to HN: their entire public activity has be 3 submissions they authored, and no comments.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Debian admins demote developer Norbert Preining for using wrong gender pronoun - karlschlosser https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2018/12/msg00032.html ====== karlschlosser The amount of unnecessary drama this has created is astonishing. Ian Jackson even deemed it necessary to start a public call for reports on Preining's "misbehaviours", even though nobody seems to have had anything other than pleasant experiences [1]. I have not much hope for Debian as a project anymore, lots of important people seem to be burnt out by crap like this and have decided it's not fun anymore. Also this was all started by Sage Sharp, in the end [2], and revolves around Codes of Conduct. Again. I have never seen an example for a Code Of Conduct working out to something positive in an Open Source project. [1] [https://lists.debian.org/debian- project/2019/01/msg00170.htm...](https://lists.debian.org/debian- project/2019/01/msg00170.html) [2] [https://www.preining.info/blog/2018/09/sharp-did-it- again/](https://www.preining.info/blog/2018/09/sharp-did-it-again/) ------ pedasmith After reading his posts, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't much care to work with Norbert, either. Being a volunteer isn't free reign to be unpleasant and argumentative, and Debian, like any organization, is free to shut the door to people they don't really care for. AFAICT, the headline is wrong. He's been asked multiple times (the Debian team was nice enough to have clear links about emails) to shape up, and he's not being teachable. ~~~ bernafett > Debian, like any organization, is free to shut the door to people they don't > really care for. Yes, if they follow the rules which have been defined to deal with stuff like this. Which they didn't. They came to a private decision and just went ahead, revoking his privileges before informing anybody (including himself) about the allegations and the decision. The "evidence-gathering" is starting now, after the decision. Which makes a lot of people itchy, understandably. > He's been asked multiple times (the Debian team was nice enough to have > clear links about emails) to shape up, and he's not being teachable. That seems to be the private stance of the anti-harrassment team, but none of the developers who have chimed in seem to understand why this has happened. At least I don't see anybody standing up and yelling "Good lord, finally!". ------ towaway1138 Makes me sad. But ultimately, nothing is forever.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What programming languages do mathematicians use? - KonaB http://mathoverflow.net/questions/11084/what-programming-languages-do-mathematicians-use ====== jimfl Statisticians commonly use SPlus or R. Applied mathematicians use some flavor of Fortran, in part because of numerical libraries available in that language. Matlab is also in heavy currency in many disciplines. Much of the time, a scientist is driven to a language not by any particular language feature, but by what code/tools are already available in that language that they can build upon for their own research. ~~~ stcredzero Many epidemiologists seem to prefer Stata. I don't know why. It's like some SQL shell out of the early 80's. I think that languages that didn't support "conventional" operator precedence lost out because that went against the expectations of science/tech types. (Smalltalk & Lisp in particular) ~~~ joeyo _Many epidemiologists seem to prefer Stata._ That seems to be a west coast thing. East coast epidemiologists that I know use some mix of S or SPSS or SAS. ------ cperciva What cars do pilots drive? What foods do vintners eat? These are silly questions -- in all three cases, the answer is "if they're smart, whatever is best for their circumstances". I know mathematicians who have used Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, Java, BASIC, Assembly, Lisp, Maple, Matlab, Magma, Mathmatica, and Maxima; and that's not counting the people who do deliberately weird things (like computing Mersenne primes in Postscript). ~~~ hugh_ _What cars do pilots drive? What foods do vintners eat?_ I'd say it's more like asking "What cars do park rangers drive?" or "What foods do wrestlers eat?" because we're talking about groups of people with quite specific requirements. The question, while overly broad, isn't silly, because there's a lot of people who have no idea and have never heard of things like Maple, Magma. Heck, now I coem to think of it I've never heard of Maxima, so your answer taught me something new. And if you learn something new from the answer, it's probably not a silly question! ------ RiderOfGiraffes The practising mathematicians I know don't program. I'm not sure if there are any ways in which programming can help with things like Functional Analysis or Geometric Topology. Not even sure about low-dimensional topology. I'll ask Tim Gowers next time I see him. The ex-mathematicians I know who now use mathematics to do things in the real- world use a full range, including all those mentioned elsewhere. For my PhD I used Fortran, BCPL, zed (not the one you might think - it was essentially "ed"), and Phoenix scripting. For my day job I use Python/Sage/NumPy, C, C++, ARM assembler, bash, BASIC and OpenOffice Calc. Infrequently and irregularly I use Lua and Scheme. On the other hand, I'm not really doing math anymore. I no longer prove theorems. ------ brown9-2 I find it very interesting that almost every single mathoverflow user (based on this page alone) uses their full name as their username on the site. Compare that with stackoverflow and HN in which we use nicknames, made up names, etc. Just interesting to see how different communities choose to handle something like this. ~~~ Rod It's a MO policy: <http://mathoverflow.net/faq> _"We also encourage you to use your real name as your username. In your own enlightened self-interest, realise that participating in blogs, Math Overflow, the arXiv, and mathematical publishing are all forms of advertising for your "brand", even if that’s not your principal purpose (and hopefully it’s not). Since job applications require you to write your real name, you might as well use it everywhere else, too."_ The bright side is that if a Fields medalist answers your question, you know it ;-) ------ blasdel Coq is the only real _Mathematics_ language I've ever played with. Everything else just feels like it's ultimately _Arithmetic_ , even when doing Symbolic Algebra natively in Haskell or Lisp or Mathematica. ------ stcredzero Quantitative analysts used to use Smalltalk quite a bit. There's still a bit of that. Ruby's taking up some of that territory now. C++ was there too, and is still going strong. ------ Imprecate Depends on the branch. In quantitative finance: C++, R, F#, Q, OCaml, MATLAB, Python (NumPy and SciPy) ~~~ BrentRitterbeck I second this. I have a quantitative finance background. I use C, C++, C#, MATLAB, and Python. MATLAB and Python are primarily for prototyping ideas. C and C++ are primarily used when I'm working with Linux. C# is exclusively used when I am working with Windows. ~~~ wtallis What kind of stuff do you use C# for? I can only imagine using it for interoperability and GUI code. ~~~ BrentRitterbeck Right now, I am writing a trading system using Trading Technologies' API. In my MSFE program we use XTrader to do a lot of our simulated trading. I thought it would be interesting challenge to create a black box to bone up on my C# skills. EDIT: As for the GUI comment, I am actually trying to stay away from a bloated GUI as speed is key in this business. Also, when we, as a program, went to Chicago during late October, so many people said that C# was becoming an important language to know if you plan on doing quant work. Up until that point, I had been focused primarily on C and C++. I thought it would be wise to do some work with C# if people at quant shops were telling me this is something I need to know. ------ Scramblejams Very often Matlab. Very often badly. And for a programmer who has to watch, it is to weep. ------ borga The one I know uses Mathematica. ~~~ stcredzero I know a bona-fide ex-NASA rocket scientist who uses Matlab. He finds that it's much more productive than C, which he used to use heavily. His NASA job basically involved numerical methods for integration to track the trajectory of the Space Shuttle. ~~~ borga I like MatLab, but for me (biologist) it's a very intricate language to learn, and AFAIK not easy to use in multiple platforms where you don't have the framework installed. And "expensive" too (as Mathematica). ~~~ stcredzero But as a rocket scientist, he says there is a lot of software ready-made for him to use, which even included graphics/animation, analysis of realtime data feeds, and limited finite-element analysis of the rocket's structure. Also, his boss had a good software budget at the time. ------ larsberg LaTeX	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
When Mummies Were the Life of the Party (2015) - Thevet http://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/now-at-the-met/2015/when-mummies-were-the-life-of-the-party ====== pluteoid You don't have to travel back in time, as the article suggests, to find societies where the dead are accorded a physical presence among the living. There are still several tribes in Africa and New Guinea which maintain generations of mummified ancestors at sacred sites, transporting them back to their villages to "participate" in ceremonies and festivals. See for example [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25998636](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25998636)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Forget Money, This Startup Wants You to Invest Time - exolymph http://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/crowdraising-crowdfunding-time.html ====== ccvannorman Login or sign up to view article? I clicked the HN "web" link but it's still login-walled. ~~~ exolymph It shouldn't be, that's weird. Can you try again and let me know what happens? ------ cheald Time _is_ money, friend.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
World record solar cell with 44.7% efficiency - X4 http://phys.org/news/2013-09-world-solar-cell-efficiency.html ====== TheLegace "These solar cells are used in concentrator photovoltaics (CPV), a technology which achieves more than twice the efficiency of conventional PV power plants in sun-rich locations. The terrestrial use of so-called III-V multi-junction solar cells, which originally came from space technology, has prevailed to realize highest efficiencies for the conversion of sunlight to electricity. In this multi-junction solar cell, several cells made out of different III-V semiconductor materials are stacked on top of each other. The single subcells absorb different wavelength ranges of the solar spectrum." If that isn't a reason to be investing in Space, I don't know what is. "This world record increasing our efficiency level by more than 1 point in less than 4 months..." I think we may start to see Moore's Law starting to be applied to Solar Cells. Which actually reminds of a chart on the waves of innovation[1] on the Stanford Tech Entrepreneurship course where we are now seeing the tail of IT and computing and beginning of renewable technologies. The same thing can be said about energy density of batteries(According to Tesla batteries). [1] Page 5 [https://d2d6mu5qcvgbk5.cloudfront.net/documents/original/69b...](https://d2d6mu5qcvgbk5.cloudfront.net/documents/original/69bd3725d86ab970f2d9509424bb67ae4c832faa.pdf?1377910658) ~~~ dpatru > If that isn't a reason to be investing in Space, I don't know what is. To justify government research, the results need to be compared to the alternative. Had NASA scientists not been working for the government, they would have been working for private companies engaged doing useful work. The Soviet Union had similar resources to the US, yet their research budget was spent wholly by government, whereas a large portion of the US research during that time was directed by private companies. If you want to restrict the comparison just to the US, ask yourself what would the massive wealth that was dedicated to NASA had produced had it been directed by private interests? What would NASA engineers have produced had they been employed by in Y-Combinator- style startups? (or even big private companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) ~~~ scarmig A couple points: 1) It's not like the Soviet Union was a terrible hellhole for research. It had impressive research output for decades. 2) That's almost beside the point, however. Let's take it as a given that more good research, whatever that is, is a worthy goal for a society, and that the market under-invests in it in favor of short term profits. It's obviously not a binary of either 100% government funding or 100% private; it's not even really a one-dimensional continuum, because for the large capital expenditures typically involved in research, the government always has a heavy involvement, either in tax breaks or grants or collaboration. The question is, how do we allocate money to produce the best research? It's undoubtedly at some value that's somewhere between 0% and 100%. 3) There's a whole lot of money floating around now that makes endeavors like SpaceX practicable. That wasn't the case in, say, the Sixties. Even if the arguments for government spending on research were weak now, they'd be stronger in the 1960's, particularly for things like space exploration that required substantial concentrations of capital. ~~~ snippyhollow As great as SpaceX is, at least half of its funding comes from NASA [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Funding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Funding) ~~~ JanezStupar I believe that SpaceX would have no problem securing funds from either BRIC, Arabs or even AlQuaeda for that matter. ------ dredmorbius For those wondering about the significance of this announcement: As several people have noted, what matters for solar PV isn't _efficiency_ but _cost per Watt_. The maximum _available_ energy is 1W/meter^2 at ground. Single-layer PV efficiency is on the order of about 40%. Mutliple-layer cells can reach a maximum of around 80%. Even with existing efficiencies, the land space necessary to dedicate to solar power for all electrical energy needs is reasonably small. A percent or so of the Earth's surface. The hard part will be fabricating the PV and/or CSP (concentrated solar thermal power) plants to collect that energy, estimates run well over $100 trillion globally (Jacobson & Delucchi). A key limiting factor in solar, wind, and other intermittent renewables is _storage_ (or baseload / standby power). Assuming you'd want 7 days' total energy output on reserve, there's quite literally not enough lead in the world to build storage for just the US, let alone the rest of the world. Pumped hydro storage is very efficient, but sites are limited. Biomass similarly doesn't scale to present populations. Geothermal is good for 5-20% of power demands depending on locations (and some places such as Iceland might be able to export energy). Thorium reactors look like a plausible bet but require development. Liquid metal / molten salt batteries (such as Donald Sadoway's designs) look like they're both cheap and abundant enough to make the grade, though they're still under development as well. Solar power _does_ have its equivalent of Moore's Law: Swanson's Law. Solar PV costs fall by 20% with each doubling of capacity. It's held since the 1970s and looks likely to continue. Effectively, costs half about every 3 years. [http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-c...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily- chart-19/print) In short: this is mostly of significance for applications in which space and/or weight are at a premium: satellite or possibly solar-powered aircraft (ultralights or airships most likely). For ground-based generation, look for costs to come down further. And pray for highly effective storage solutions. ~~~ forgottenpaswrd "The maximum available energy is 1W/meter^2 at ground" Where are you from, Britain? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight) ""sunshine duration" to mean the cumulative time during which an area receives direct irradiance from the Sun of at least 120 watts per meter" "The total amount of energy received at ground level from the sun at the zenith is 1004 watts per square meter" This depends on altitude of course, the maximum is over 1300W in space. ~~~ Roboprog I assumed he meant "1 kW" and missed the k. ~~~ dredmorbius Quite. ------ twelvechairs this is great but its worth noting that efficiency isn't really what's holding solar production back, its price. few peoples roofs are crammed with PV to the point where they can't fit more in. ~~~ paul_f This is the fundamental problem with PV. Compared to cheap natural gas, there just isn't much future in it ~~~ jussij No Future? That might be true, except for that rather large elephant in the room call _human-induced climate_ change. ~~~ diydsp yes and PP presupposes "cheap natural gas." as witnessed by recent fracking- induced earthquakes [1] there may be very little cheap natural gas in the future. [1][http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6142/1225942](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6142/1225942) ------ greglindahl Odd that the figure says that the efficiency was 44.7% +/\- 3.1% -- given the big error bar, how could they say they'd increased 1% in 4 months? Measure it again, who knows what you'll get! ~~~ nazgulnarsil ERROR BARS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY ~~~ kyberias Care to elaborate? ~~~ scythe The +/\- 3.1% is relative to the efficiency. The way to read it is: 0.447 +/\- 3.1%, where now it's more obvious that it translates to more like 0.447 +/\- 0.014. ~~~ greglindahl Even if it really means 0.447 +/\- 0.014, an increase of 0.01 is not very significant! ------ sejje Maybe I missed it in the article, but what was considered a good efficiency prior to this? ~~~ diydsp someone on wikipedia has been maintaining a beautiful image of the history of solar cell efficiency for various technologies.. let's see if this has been added yet. It looks 1. No, and 2. There was a recent discovery by Sharp of 44.4%. Main page: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PVeff%28rev130923%29a.jpg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PVeff%28rev130923%29a.jpg) ~~~ contingencies Image is credited to _L.L. Kazmerski_ of the _National Renewable Energy Laboratory_ (NREL), Golden, CO. Have a look at the types of markers shown on the image key again. While vast amounts of resources are being dumped on efficient electricity extraction through expensive, advanced manufacturing processes, some are looking at going back to organics, which NREL classes as 'emerging'. Apparently hybrid organic/electrical photovoltaics date back to 1958, and can produce 11.1% (roughly 1/3-1/2 of currently available manufactured products) efficiency while remaining cheap to produce at high volumes. Mitsubishi is one of the research leaders. More at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_solar_cell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_solar_cell) ------ ck2 While nearly 45% is impressive, I'd rather see "cheap as paint" solar cells at 10% efficiency that are football fields in size. Put them on every commercial rooftop and all that free space we have out west in the USA. ~~~ dmckeon It is an interesting challenge for a PV-curious homeowner - if efficiency is increasing, and capital costs are dropping, and assuming that rooftop cells might eventually need replacing - it is better to cover one's roof all at once with current tech, or to start smaller and plan to add new panels over time until the roof is full, and then start replacing old panels? Local variables would probably predominate, along with loan/lease/financing and ability to resell. ------ dgreensp So when does solar power become cheap and efficient enough that it's a real game changer? It seems like the numbers have gotten a lot better in recent years, at least in terms of efficiency. ~~~ tsotha Solar is already cheaper in most places provided you have net metering, which is a subsidy. But there's a limit to how many people can use the grid for free. ~~~ evolve2k Don't forget to take into account that grid connected solar houses feed excess power produced into the grid, there's no free about it, these are essentially micro power stations which enhance the grid. ~~~ tsotha You're missing the point. The free part is they're selling back power at retail rates. In net metering if you generate as much power as you use you don't pay any per kWh charges. Where I live the power company is selling power to consumers for about 22 cents per kWh. From normal wholesale vendors it's buying power for somewhere around seven cents, but it's buying buying power from net metering people for 22 cents. That's where the "using the grid for free" part comes in. People who purchase wholesale-generated power are paying the power company's overhead, whereas the net metering people aren't. ~~~ reitzensteinm In addition, the home owners are selling a electricity at a fixed time and buying it back with flexibility, not taking into account the spot price of the electricity (which is going to lower drastically during peak solar times over the next few decades). If every home owner installed sufficient solar power to be neutral under net metering, the grid would have to be maintained, with traditional generation supplied at off peak solar times _at no cost to the home owner_. If that doesn't show how heavy a subsidy net metering is, I don't know what will. It's not sustainable and should never be used to price out solar. ------ SamuelKillin Good on them. In reality, however, fuel from the sun is free and we have unlimited land. Getting the cost down and economies of scale are what everyone is really focussed on. ~~~ tsotha Who has unlimited land? ~~~ SamuelKillin I'm in Australia. We have unlimited land and enough sun to power the solar system. ~~~ tsotha You guys might be one of the few countries with effectively unlimited land. But remember the power has to get from where it's generated to where it's needed. ------ tomasien I'm going to turn to Hacker News, as I always do, for context: what would 50% efficiency mean? ~~~ ChuckMcM Short answer is that more of the solar insolation that hits Earth gets converted into electricity. So on the equator its about 1kW per square meter, in North America closer to 700W sq Meter, and converted at 50% you would start at 350W per sq meter, which after rectification might be 300W per square meter. ------ rocco Guys, anyone knows the sense of "measured at a concentration of 297 suns."? is sufficient much less energy to transform the earth in a giant BBQ. ~~~ asab My question too - I wonder how it would perform in normal sunlight. ~~~ mchannon Concentrator cells make a number of tradeoffs in order to make their performance as high as possible (and keep from melting, etc.). I would guess around 22% efficient in one-sun AM1.0; that's about what other concentrator cells in this upper tier do. If it's slightly cloudy, I could see efficiencies dropping to the single digits, as each of these cells is actually four different cells all wired in series, each sensitive to different wavelengths of light. If the blue drops out, the corresponding cell on the top of the stack acts as a resistor (and it can even burn out, being so thin). Solar cell efficiency records (particularly for concentrator applications) are like discovering new transuranic elements- extremely useful and interesting at first, then significantly diminishing returns. ------ officialjunk Now combine this with IBM's research to collect most of the energy lost to heat production and push the efficiency up to 80% [http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/ibms-solar-tech- is-80...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/ibms-solar-tech- is-80-efficient-thanks-to-supercomputer-know-how/) ------ brownBananas Is the composition of this one solar cell from 4 subcells of any significance? Is it just 4 for a reason? ~~~ mchannon Imagine you have commissioned 100 different manufacturers to make you 100 different arbitrary Lego knockoffs; each manufacturer picks a color, thickness, and a peg pitch (spacing between the pegs). Each manufacturer only makes exactly one kind. Some manufacturers' legos will fit together, and some won't. Some manufacturers make theirs very cheaply and in mass quantities, and some will take years to deliver a very small number at very high prices. As a solar cell designer, you want to make a stack of these legos to form a rainbow. It has to go from blue on the top to red on the bottom, and it has to stack together without too much force. Think of a brand-X terrestrial Home Depot crystalline solar cell as just yellow lego bricks. They aren't the whole rainbow (and green would actually be a closer match to sunlight if you could only pick one color) but they're cheap. Gallium Arsenide legos are green, but they're really hard to make. Germanium legos are red, and it turns out that the green Gallium Arsenides fit on them really well. Yellow Silicon ones, on the other hand, don't fit well with either. So that brings us to two. Indium Phosphide legos are blue and so are Gallium Phosphide legos. But neither of those fit well on the green Gallium Arsenide; one's lego pins are too dense, the other too sparse. It took a long time for a manufacturer to come up with the right blend, thickness, and color, but they were able to come up with a lego that is blue, made from a mix called Indium Gallium Phosphide, and stacks nicely on top of the green Gallium Arsenide. So that's 3. The fourth layer might be Indium Gallium Arsenide Nitride (let's just call it orange), shoved between the existing layers; somehow making a mix of a good quality lego, but one that makes the right color, right thickness, and right pin pitch. Now to translate to real physics: The pin pitch is the lattice parameter of each of these crystals, or the distance between individual atoms. If you attempt to epitaxially grow (grow on top of in the same fashion) a different compound than what already exists there, it tends to work ok if the lattice parameters are close. If they're radically different, you can get growth but it's highly disordered and ends up making a lousy layer and a lousy solar cell. ------ cauthonLuck recent improvements in all solid state dye-sensitized solar cells show more potential for lowering the cost of solar energy. ------ marcfawzi When will the world run out of the "III-V semiconductor materials" ? And which nation or corporation currently controls the largest deposits? ~~~ diydsp haha a legit question, but i guess you got downvoted because you could have researched it and shared it? dunno. anyway. not a chem dude at all, but it appears III-V semis are when you combine: "III-V compound semiconductors obtained by combining group III elements (essentially Al, Ga, In) with group V elements (essentially N, P , As, Sb). This gives us 12 possible combinations; the most important ones are probably GaAs, InP GaP and GaN." [1] In other words, the materials in general are: Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Antimony, Arsenic, Bismuth, Boron, Aluminum, Gallium, Indium and Thallium. I imagine nitrogen, phosphorus and aluminum are the easiest to find generally throughout the world. China appears to control 90% of antimony [2] and its price seems to have gone up 700% over the last decade. Arsenic seems to have major supply issues, one of the most critical in terms of scarcity according to [3] and [4]. Nevertheless, the price has gone down over the last 100 years significantly and according to this source is less scarce than it was a century ago: [5] Bismuth is "relatively rare" but doesn't appear to be scarce. it is found mostly in Peru Japan Mexico, Canada, Bolivia and not in the USA. [6] remaining elements are left as an exercise to the reader. [1] [http://www.tf.uni- kiel.de/matwis/amat/semitech_en/kap_2/back...](http://www.tf.uni- kiel.de/matwis/amat/semitech_en/kap_2/backbone/r2_3_1.html) [2][http://www.tf.uni- kiel.de/matwis/amat/semitech_en/kap_2/back...](http://www.tf.uni- kiel.de/matwis/amat/semitech_en/kap_2/backbone/r2_3_1.html) [3][http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2012/a...](http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2012/acs- presspac-february-8-2012/arsenic-criticality-poses-concern-for-modern- technology.html) [4][http://environment.yale.edu/news/article/arsenic-supply- at-r...](http://environment.yale.edu/news/article/arsenic-supply-at-risk/) [5][http://theunbrokenwindow.com/2010/03/08/running-out-of- resou...](http://theunbrokenwindow.com/2010/03/08/running-out-of-resources- arsenic-edition/) [6][http://www.carondelet.pvt.k12.ca.us/Family/Science/Nitrogen/...](http://www.carondelet.pvt.k12.ca.us/Family/Science/Nitrogen/bismuth.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
If Earth Was 50% Larger, We Might Be Stuck Here - sjcsjc https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2017/07/06/if_earth_was_50_larger_we_might_be_stuck_here.html ====== rthomas6 How close are we to a feasible space elevator? Once we have something that can withstand the forces involved, we can just ride up to space for a fraction of the energy and cost, and start our propulsion from orbit instead of the surface. ~~~ willcipriano As I understand it, very far. The materials science isn't there, we have yet to conceive of a material that would be able to carry it's own weight let alone move a useful load. ~~~ avmich No, the problem isn't in the material, that's relatively easy part, we already have good prototypes in carbon nanotubes. ~~~ willcipriano My source: > "No current material exists with sufficiently high tensile strength and > sufficiently low density out of which we could construct the cable," he told > me. "There's nothing in sight that's strong enough to do it — not even > carbon nanotubes." "The best that theorists can do right now is come up with a material that's about two-thirds the strength needed to make a practical elevator," Henson told me. "And that's a very, very short tiny tube."[0] [0][https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-well-probably-never-build-a- spac...](https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-well-probably-never-build-a-space- elevator-5984371) ------ scaredginger The title should have mentioned the measure was diameter, rather than mass or volume. They give wildly different outcomes. ------ gaukes Anyone think this is an additional factor in the Fermi paradox? i.e planets that are too small can’t support a strong atmosphere and life. Planets that are too big make space travel too uneconomical. ~~~ c22 I've often considered an alien planet with an atmosphere so thick that one couldn't see the night sky. Would inhabitants of this world even be interested in space travel? How much longer would it take for them to discover space, or even effective navigation of their own sphere? Maybe these people just wouldn't be explorers. ~~~ ncmncm Then there is the Krikkit response to discovering a universe beyond the clouds: "It'll have to go." ------ downrightmike Yes, but what about only 49% larger? ~~~ perl4ever My question is what if we were unconcerned about the risks of nuclear powered rockets, could we get off a larger planet then? ~~~ Asraelite The article doesn't seem to consider non-conventional launch strategies. With things like Project Orion, mid-air launches (by either balloon or plane), and space elevators all being theoretically possible, it seems unlikely that any given civilization would never be able achieve spaceflight, given enough time. ~~~ lxmorj Right? A balloon first stage seems like an obvious work-around... ~~~ perl4ever Insert xkcd about how the difficulty in getting to orbit is speed not altitude. This is all the more true about a larger planet than earth. Sure, you might have a thicker atmosphere, but that's an additional challenge. Needing a balloon (if it made sense, I couldn't do the calculation) would be a reflection of the difficulty above and beyond the increased orbital velocity that is the basic problem. ~~~ lxmorj Well sure, but the majority of your energy spent is fighting to get up to speed while in the atmosphere. A balloon or dirigible or some buoyancy play should be able to get you to a certain atmospheric density regardless of planetary gravity. That cuts the bottom off of the rocket equation pyramid and reduces drag immensely at your 'starting' point.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Meet DARPA's Humanoid Robot - wikiburner http://www.fastcompany.com/3014203/fast-feed/meet-darpas-humanoid-robot-that-could-someday-save-you-from-a-crumbling-building ====== hedonist Or could be used to "humanely" incapacitate your daughter if she gets mixed up in the wrong kind of campus protest, not too far down the road from now. ~~~ JoeAltmaier Wow that was a fast jump from technology to cynicism/paranoia. This is useful only tethered, under the direct control of an operator. ~~~ hedonist Fair enough: your daughter will be tear gassed[1] under the tethered, direct control of a human operator then. [1] tased, pepper sprayed, heatblasted, subject to concussion blasts and/or other non-lethal crowd control measures as deemed necessary and appropriate by the exigent circumstances of the moment. ------ jffry Why are we yelling?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why there's nothing quite like iPhone - k-mcgrady http://www.apple.com/iphone/why-theres-iphone/ ====== imd23 The storytelling, the design and the animations are just sick.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Launching Your First App (from someone who has) - ryno2019 http://sixrevisions.com/tips/launching-your-first-app/ ====== melling Getting the word out seems to be the hardest part. Articles typically scroll through HN so fast that it doesn't really help, plus it's probably not the audience for many apps. Reddit has small communities but they won't make you. My apps, for example, are in a crowded market where I've calculated that there's at least $140m in VC money. [https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/15/top-5-start-ups- crea...](https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/15/top-5-start-ups-creating-ios- language-learning-apps/) And some of that money buys television ads: [http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7Nku/babbel-learn-on-the- go](http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7Nku/babbel-learn-on-the-go) The app market grew up fast. ~~~ ryno2019 Definitely. I think longevity is the best asset: releasing multiple Apps over a period of time that do moderately well. Now you have a platform _and_ personal experience about what works and what doesn't. ------ nadavw Going thru these growing pains ourselves... Well written, couldn't agree more... One of the biggest problems with apps (when we considered the Lean Startup application) is that you can't ~~~ nadavw A/B as quickly as you can on Web (Android much better). Def requires much more initial research before mvp	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes - veb http://spottedsun.com/someone-stole-sherlocks-300000-likes/ ====== goodside The moral of the story here is that you shouldn't invest your time and emotional energy into things that actually belong to other people. You didn't own a website here. You didn't write code, you didn't set up servers, and you didn't sit around worrying about whether you were monetizing well enough to keep the site from imploding under its own popularity. You volunteered to be the curator of an entry in a database owned by a multi- billion-dollar company, you took an abnormal amount of pride in your work, and after a few years they decided your services were no longer needed. You are owed nothing. Be more careful with how you invest your time from now on. ~~~ ryguytilidie I actually came to write that the big takeaway for me was to care about things that actually exist. Pouring your life into a fan site that can one day disappear seems incredibly depressing. In that time others have built companies, relationships and a happy life and you have built: a collection of fan art for an obscure tv show. Isn't there something better one could be doing? ~~~ jquery A more Zenlike takeaway would be to realize that everything has an end and to accept that. There is nothing that can't be taken away from you. ~~~ GoodIntentions I read that as "there is nothing that can be taken away from you" Same frame of mind I think, slightly different way of expressing it. :P ~~~ danabramov “Music is the space between the notes” – Claude Debussy ------ AgentConundrum > Why does the other page have the original likes? Because Facebook doesn't know how to deal with changes to pages. Seriously. Facebook has unilaterally changed my affiliations on me at least twice. There are probably others that have changed, like things I've 'liked', but two really stand out for me. First, they decided I didn't actually go to the Canadian college that I'm quite sure I attended. They decided instead that I had gone to a similarly- named university in the United States. I'm not sure what happened to the old page/affiliation, but Facebook couldn't handle it. Recently, I discovered that one of my former employers had been acquired and changed/lost their Facebook page. Now, Facebook is trying to convince me that I actually worked for a band with a similar name to the former name of the company I had worked for. In neither case was I informed of the change. Several of my friends are still considered to have gone to the American university. I assume some former co- workers are similarly affiliated with the band, but I haven't gone to the trouble to check. ~~~ DannyPage Similarly, I was apart of a fraternity that was local to my school. But then a female sorority with a few more people came on Facebook, took/stole/transferred the likes, and now I have a pink flower where a black and white crest once was, and no way to reclaim all the old posts or pictures. It's very weird. ------ fredwolens My name is Fred Wolens, and I work for Facebook’s Policy Communications Team. We apologize for the temporary inconvenience caused by the migration of the Page’s content and Likes. We have already restored the Page, and there shouldn’t be any remaining issues. Unfortunately, the Sherlock Page was not the official BBC fan Page for the show; this caused the Page to be flagged as a violation of our terms and we mistakenly removed instead of migrated the Page. After we found out about the problem, we renamed the Sherlock Page to Fans of Sherlock to comply with our policies and migrated the fans + content. We’re sorry for the trouble caused and we’re constantly iterating on our processes to improve the accuracy of our reporting system. ~~~ veb Hi Fred. Thank you for posting this explanation -- I do have a question though, the current "Sherlock" page -- is that an official page? How long will it take for these changes to appear in Facebook search? ~~~ Meist Yes. The current Sherlock Page (<https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sherlock>) is official. Search should populate in the next couple days, the re-crawl shouldn't take more than a week or so. ------ simonsarris Well that's nicer than what they used to do. I remember in the very early days of Facebook Pages, as soon as they came out I created "Honda" and "Subaru", both with a substantial number of Likes (they were called fans back then, I think?) I kept my posts on those pages strictly factual, and really just parroted emails from the two companies and occasionally asked for the audience's opinion. After about a year both of them were shut down by the respective real car companies, and I tried to email their PR about how if they can be reactivated I could just hand them over, since the fanbase was relatively large at the time, but neither ever responded to me. Oh well. ------ mocko Most likely your page and its fans have been appropriated by the content owner. This is a feature YouTube & others now offer content owners as a way to steal a ready-constructed online fan base from real fans who invested their own time building a community around the brand. There's a moral to this story: industrial production of culture is not beneficial to its consumers. ~~~ simonbrown He ruled that out (though not intirely) by the fact that a previous page was appropriated and Facebook notified him. Also, if that were the case it would have probably been redirected/converted to an official page. I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that companies shouldn't produce TV shows (I assume that's what you mean by industrial production of culture). Edit: They have now emailed him, but I doubt it was the same kind of email he was sent before, since it doesn't mention a company. ------ Ashoke Hey Mike, your page was incorrectly flagged and removed. Facebook has restored it now and changed the name of the page to more accurately reflect what your page is about. Sorry for the inconvenience. <https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=202753086436852> ------ pud Looks like it's back now, with 300,000+ likes. Thanks on behalf of the internet, whoever works at Facebook and saw this. :-) <https://www.facebook.com/ModernSherlock> ~~~ veb Definitely. Thank you Internet, and thank you to the people at Facebook who looked into this. ------ brownbat I remember the 90s, when we all just built fan pages directly on the Internet itself. Well, ok, that's not fair. We also made fan pages on AOL and Geocities, but we got rid of those after a while since gated Internet couldn't compete in the long run with regular Internet. I guess now we have Facebook, though, and it's different... though I forget how. Remind me, why did we make yet another gated mirror of the Internet? ------ GoodIntentions Having a hard time understanding why anyone would put unfettered effort into building up content on a platform where they have absolutely no right of access save at the pleasure of the platform owner. Take that love of the show and build a fansite or better yet something where you don't have to worry about the copyright holder shutting you down. ------ meric It looks like he got his likes back? <http://www.Facebook.com/ModernSherlock> ~~~ veb Yep! Very pleased that's happened. Seems like a lot of people missed the page. Still wondering about the other page though... ModernSherlock page no longer shows up in search though. ------ pritam2020 There should be some way to distinguish between a fan page, and an official page. So, that people who want to follow either have a choice. ~~~ saurik There is: it is called a "community page". This person flagrantly violated this mechanism, against Facebook's terms of service, in order to capitalize on the fame of a television show he did not create and was not involved in. ~~~ veb This feature wasn't exactly around when the page was made. ------ stephensprinkle Exactly why I don't build or put marked amounts of time into platforms I have no control over. ------ artursapek Cache. Not sure what's up. [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://spottedsun.com/someone- stole-sherlocks-300000-likes/) ------ nothacker Don't stop with this post. I think the girl with blog of the school lunches in Scotland showed a modern method to solve any similar customer service issue. Start a blog and continually update it with whatever your issue is in a factual non-opinionated way. Wait for them to try to shut you down, then go to the media and social avenues so that it becomes hot topic, and they'll fix it. Then they may screw you again and you'll have to go to the media again and then they'll fix it again. Perfect solution. ------ nkwiatek Not to make light of your situation with this tangent, but I must say that that is a cool 404 page. ~~~ simonbrown I can't reproduce it (perhaps because I don't have a Facebook account). ------ hanapbuhay I think Fans of Sherlock just jacked ModernSherlock, the vanity url. ~~~ veb It's actually my page!! I'm so confused. 750 likes?! but at least the content is back: <http://i.imgur.com/jil2q.png> ~~~ hanapbuhay Yes, at least you have the page back. Grats. What I'm noticing is that my same 3 Facebook friends like both your fan page and the TV show's page. But that's possibly a strange coincidence. This might be the work of FB running some categorization cleanup. Your fan page is now sub-categorized as a Community Page for the Sherlock TV show. FB doesn't seem to have all popular fan pages sub-categorized. For example, fb.me/fansofapple, isn't shown connected to Apple at all. ------ silentscope "yes I know, first world problems." yep. nice post.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Remotely installing Debian using a web browser - known http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/WebInstaller/ ====== mseebach Hmm, I see a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue.. How do you configure the IP address if there's no monitor or input devices? Most colocated sites I've worked with requires static IPs. Perhaps it could be burned on the CD - add a tool that takes that info, and makes a ISO specific for that server. CD-Rs are expendible anyway these days. I could have used that last week. I had to drive serveral hours to go onsite to install a Debian server. If I could have mailed a CD-R to the guys, and done the install remotely, I could have saved a bunch of hours. ~~~ rcoder In a datacenter where you control the DHCP assignments, it would be fairly easy to determine the IP address of a new server, since the MAC address is usually on a label somewhere on the chassis. For a remote install, you could either configure the IP before burning the install media (as you suggested), or have the installer scan connected USB devices for a known config file name, and load configuration from it. That way, all you would need to do is have the colo tech load a file you emailed them onto a thumb drive, and then insert that into an available USB port on the server before starting installation. ------ davemabe Wow - this is exactly what I needed this morning actually. Is this mirrored anywhere? The site is down it appears.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tell HN: Obscurity is a valid security layer in your defense strategy - DyslexicAtheist ====== ReptileMan as long as you don't count on it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Philadelphia passes a law banning “cashless” retail stores - zymhan https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/03/sorry-amazon-philadelphia-bans-cashless-stores/ ====== el_duderino Yesterday's discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328547](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328547)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why the Motorola Android is a sure-fire hit - PatrickMorrell http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/reviews/4335459.html?nav=RSS20&src=syn&dom=yah_buzz&mag=pop ====== haseman No such thing as a sure-fire hit, especially in the mobile world. Verizon's Droid looks like the best Android phone to date, but that won't make it a hit in-and-of itself. The Droid's best feature, over the iPhone, may end up being it's ability to actually make and receive phone calls. ------ noelchurchill Summary: The phone will be a hit because all the other phones on the Verizon network suck, and because Verizon doesn't offer the iPhone.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Say Hello to the New WordPress Editor - gmays https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ ====== benbristow I enjoy how the article is actually displayed using the editor. No better way of showing technology by showing it actually working! ------ nailer I'm really enjoying these minimal editors - Ghost has a great one too. It's so weird firing up something like Word (or Openoffice) and it's a shotgun blast of distracting icons. It seems like the old apps are more about editing and tweaking than creating. And I know they can never change since people get really angry when Word changes.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
HackThis CTF 2013 - BoomBass http://www.hackthis.co.uk/ctf ====== BoomBass This is great little series of levels which I am currently working my way through. It appears there will be prizes awarded so it's worth having a go.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Luna visual programming language beta release - kryptiskt http://www.luna-lang.org/# ====== cs702 Duplicate: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16163769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16163769) ------ sytelus I'm looking for visual language that does not require ability to read (except, say, knowing numbers 1 to 10). Does anything like this exist? I looked at Spark but that doesn't fall in to this category. The idea is as follows: Devices like tablets and smartphones are naturally usable by 4-year old with minimal and even no instructions even if they can't read yet. Is there a visual programming language that can be implemented on such devices that is usable by just 4 year old? ~~~ markwhiting Scratch requires only a very basic understanding of terms, and has been widely extended, as in translated to many languages and perhaps completely visual versions have been made. Here's a link to the base project → [https://scratch.mit.edu](https://scratch.mit.edu) ------ TailorJones [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=luna&sort=byDate&prefix=false&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=luna&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=last24h&type=story)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Fine grain Cross-VM Attacks on Xen and VMware are possible - pronoiac http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/248 ====== p4bl0 It is not the first time that the possibility of Cross-VM side-channel attacks is shown. Previous paper on the subject: \- Flush+Reload: a High Resolution, Low Noise, L3 Cache Side-Channel Attack [http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/448](http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/448) \- Cross-VM Side Channels and Their Use to Extract Private Keys [https://www.cs.unc.edu/~reiter/papers/2012/CCS.pdf](https://www.cs.unc.edu/~reiter/papers/2012/CCS.pdf) Side-channels on the web are more and more present. Non-functional behaviors carry too much information if proper countermeasures are not embedded in the design of some features. For instance with autocomplete features, it is possible to know what is being typed by someone even over HTTPS by looking at the packet traffic due to autocompletion: \- Keystroke Timing Analysis of on-the-fly Web Apps [http://flyer.sis.smu.edu.sg/acns13-2.pdf](http://flyer.sis.smu.edu.sg/acns13-2.pdf) \- Implementing side-channel attacks on suggest boxes in web applications [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2490436](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2490436) (did not find the PDF online for free -_-, EDIT: The file happens to be available here: [http://www.fileswap.com/dl/FTYVPFkN5/](http://www.fileswap.com/dl/FTYVPFkN5/) :-°) \- Some slides: [http://people.cse.nitc.ac.in/kartik/files/k4rtik- csu491-semi...](http://people.cse.nitc.ac.in/kartik/files/k4rtik- csu491-seminar.pdf) I think that while a bit scary, this is quite interesting. ~~~ akira2501 It's a little scary, but this particular attack is only viable against AES-128, and to a lesser extent AES-192. Using the full number of rounds in AES-256 makes cache timing attacks much less likely to succeed. ------ pedrocr Skimmed the article quickly. This is a practical application of a timing attack on AES by Bernstein. They seem to be able to recover complete keys in all SSL libraries tested(gcrypt, openssl and polarssl). This is also completely fixed by using the hardware AES implementation in recent processors, so should basically fix itself with time as all the cloud providers upgrade systems. Does anyone know if AES is particularly susceptible to these side-channel attacks? Are the Bernstein constructs in NaCl safer because of being easier to implement in constant time? Edit: Apparently NaCl even includes a constant time AES implementation[1] so it would be nice to have seen it compared in this paper. [1] [http://nacl.cr.yp.to/features.html](http://nacl.cr.yp.to/features.html) ~~~ p4bl0 What's important is not only "constant time implementation" but rather, as it is written on the page you linked that there are "no data-dependent branches". Because when you have branches, even if they are perfectly balanced in time (i.e., number of instructions), it is still possible to attack on recent processors with pipelines (like in smartphones for instance), because the processor will start computing the more probable branch in advance (and if you know how it works you can compute which branch that is) and then it will actually be faster if it is actually this branch that is taken than if it is the other. It's a bit like cache timing attacks, but with code instead of data. ~~~ pedrocr I was reading the features page in the NaCl site and it seems timing attacks require very careful coding to avoid. The processor will leak information all over the place (instruction count, TLB, cache, etc). NaCl even includes constant time 16 and 32 byte string comparison functions. Instead of hoping everyone writes constant-time code are Intel/AMD working on virtualization extensions to fix these? Maybe allowing high-end CPUs to partition their cache/TLBs/BPUs per virtual host and virtualizing the instruction pointer and other cross-VM leaks. ~~~ pjscott Using the AES-NI instructions completely gets rid of the attack on AES, and hopefully future ciphers will be designed from the start for side channel resistance. ~~~ p4bl0 > Using the AES-NI instructions completely gets rid of the attack on AES. I would be very, very careful before saying that. Actually I wouldn't even say it. Hardware implementation are also subject to side-channels, even when they include countermeasures. Leakage models we have for hardware are not accurate enough, and maybe they can't be. Take for instance with the power consumption side-channel: not every bit in a register leak the same (when being set or reset, they do not consume the same amount of energy / emit the same amount of EM radiation), and the actual leak depends on so many thing that the only way to know it is to measure it in the precise environment of the threat on the actual hardware that may be subject to attack. Actual hardware behavior is so difficult to predict, and side-channel attacks manage to exploit any bias, leak, glitch, anything. Plus, there is still the possibility of fault injection attacks… ------ mariusz79 It does looks like OpenBSD team with its "hate" of virtualization was right all along ~~~ pedrocr This is only an issue if you're hosted together with the attacker, which is indeed an issue on public cloud services. But if all the VMs on the host belong to you, as is common in corporate setups, at best this is a way to escalate a breach. Public services could make it easier to make sure you have a whole host for yourself. I can imagine even small sites wanting to make sure that the machines doing SSL termination aren't co-hosted with anyone else. ~~~ mariusz79 Well, not entirely. Imagine running Windows guest on OpenBSD host. It shouldn't be a problem to infect the guest vm with some kind of a virus/trojan developed especially to take advantage of this attack vector. In this case you may be thinking that you're safer running OpenBSD as your main os, and using Windows guest to watch youtube videos, but in reality by having Flash player installed on your Win VM you can't be sure that the host has not been compromised.. So while on the paper, it may look like virtualization is safer, in reality it's a false sense of security. ~~~ DerpDerpDerp I would argue that it's still safer, even though it's not completely safe. You shouldn't view any sort of security measure as perfect, but that doesn't mean that using good practices doesn't contribute to better safety. Using your example: attackers being reduced to performing side channel attacks after owning a VM is better than them having direct access to the host machine itself (using the same exploit), even if it's still a security flaw. Defense in depth is a good idea, even if it's not perfect. (Note that your argument goes from "not entirely safe" to "not safer", which doesn't logically follow.) ------ pronoiac It's about AES key recovery, even from different cores. ------ canadev So, if I use a VPS, how do I protect myself? I am not clear on what to do here. I don't knowingly use AES anywhere; does using bcrypt/scrypt for my PW hashing help at all or is that unrelated? ------ mrsaint Any reason KVM is not included in the analysis? I suppose it'd be also open to this attack?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
MI6 (SIS) Is Developing a Node.js, Angular, NoSQL, Hadoop System on Cloudera - haser_au https://recruitmentservices.applicationtrack.com/vx/lang-en-GB/mobile-0/appcentre-2/brand-2/candidate/so/pm/1/pl/5/opp/495-Software-Specialists-and-Support-Roles-Ref-495/en-GB ====== john42 5 buzzwords in a row, that's a bingo! :) ~~~ abluecloud You just say, bingo. ------ crb002 Cloudera came to town little over a year ago to work on an undisclosed project. Pretty sure given the Bosh Global Services want ads for a Hadoop developer it was to process drone images for the Iowa Air Guard. ------ nhunzaker "Bespoke software development using Java, Javascript." I suppose this means from scratch? Seems like a very important criteria for writing applications with few external dependencies. That also makes me curious about the approval process for selecting JavaScript frameworks at an organization like this. What is the leading factor -- maintainability? ~~~ spacecowboy_lon That's how big data is done with Hadoop lots of custom JAVA - its an absolute swine to work with. (which is why a lot use python wrappers) I used to do M/R using PL/1G back in the 80's and it was easier then than using flipping Java is today. ------ message Is this good salary for UK? ~~~ tomelders Not for anyone with those skills. As a contractor in London they'd be looking at something between £70k and £150k+. Makes me wonder wether our security services really are recruiting the best they can find, or just the best they can afford. ~~~ spacecowboy_lon SIS sister Org was pitching people on linked-in recently my mate who is ex MI got one and laughed and joked "not on those poverty wages" The problem is for liberal arts grads civil service wages aren't to bad but its far to low for technical specialists - and a contractor Data scientist can earn more than the PM ~~~ UK-AL The PM's salary is artificially low for PR reasons. Many many local government heads earn far more than the PM. ~~~ spacecowboy_lon A lot of those figures are not really _annual salary_ the really big figures are skewed by people taking early retirement. ------ haser_au Hiring Full time, graduate and part-time software specialists; [https://www.sis.gov.uk/science-and- technology.html](https://www.sis.gov.uk/science-and-technology.html) ~~~ Ianvdl That website has a very odd design, and is quite distracting. ~~~ neogodless "What would geeks like in a web site? Let's do that!" \- People that do not understand technologists. ------ rl3 > _You should not discuss your application, other than with your partner or > close family member, providing that they are British._ The latter half of that strikes me as almost laughable. ~~~ yeukhon Not "laughable" because it makes sense from their political point of view, from their organization point of view. That's the same as signing NDA. You can leak it, no one can stop you, but you can face consequence if you do. How often, god knows. You are applying for M16 (there is also M15). That's the equivalent of CIA. It's a disclaimer and a warning more than anything TBH. ~~~ escapologybb In case it wasn't a typo, you might be interested to know that it's actually MI6 rather than M16. The longer form is Military Intelligence, Section 6 you see. [1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Intelligence_Service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Intelligence_Service) Edit: If it was a typo please ignore me and have a great day! ~~~ yeukhon haha. yes! :-) Thanks for catching! ~~~ escapologybb No worries! ------ des429 Does this mean the end of the double-O program? ~~~ benten10 The double-O program was mostly a relic of the cold war era that, while may have been in vogue during the dying Yeltsin years and the earlier Bush years, has been getting outdated. There are obviously places that would gain from it, but we have developed more efficient means to complete the same objectives, without as much collateral damage and project bloat, if you get what I mean. The world of 2015 is agile, and quick-moving than the antiquated world of double-O program, which seemed to exist solely to justify the vast amount of infrastructure and manpower needed to support it. To put it differently, double-O program was mostly a jobs program (in terms of support staff), is not at all as glamorous as new recruits are originally made to believe, and it may be the right time for us to finally abandon the double-O frame of mind. ~~~ Avalaxy Nice try, C. ~~~ escapologybb Nah, if that was C he‘d be writing in green ink[1]. Personally I blame the Chinese. [1]: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and- order/5918467...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and- order/5918467/MI6-boss-Sir-John-Scarlett-still-signs-letters-in-green- ink.html) ------ goldenkey "Secret" Intelligence Service...Seems kinda transparent to me, heh. ------ gregjwild Heh, I guess they're banking on someone having a thing for snooping on other people's porn habits than they are getting paid. ------ robinduckett They are going to have problems finding high calibre software developers (especially in London) who meet the eligibility criteria (No Class A drugs in the previous 12 months, no Class B drugs in the previous 6 months). Not even the UK Prime Minister himself falls into this eligibility criteria! ~~~ DanBC > previous 6 months Cameron probably hasn't taken class A or B drugs in the previous 6 or 12 months. ~~~ TheOtherHobbes There may be differing opinions about that. In an ideal world there would be mandatory drug testing for everyone in Westminster and senior corporate management of any kind. I think a lot of people would be surprised by the results. ~~~ spacecowboy_lon Bit authoritarian makes tracking everyone's phone meta seem tame - and don't give the Home Secretary Ideas :-)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Newspaper moves into coffee shop, invites citizens to contribute. - larrik http://www.registercitizen.com/articles/2010/12/02/news/doc4cf7892cbcf12181311203.txt?viewmode=fullstory ====== larrik To summarize, they are moving to a new office that is a coffee shop (complete with free wifi), library, and news room. People are invited to come in and take part in the whole newspaper process. This is also a newspaper that recognizes the web as being their more valuable readership. Seems like an interesting experiment to me, and I wonder how it will turn out.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Airline industry divided over passenger electronics - jrnkntl http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-15/turning-off-iphone-critical-to-pilots-citing-interference.html ====== DoubleMalt So there are less than 100 reports of interference of radio devices with planes. And then there is the study where 30% of the people said they do not turn off their devices. The probability that something happens is minuscule, but above zero. Other examples where the trade off between security and convenience has to be made is the driving of cars and liquids on a plane. I'm really curious in which direction this debate will swing. (FTR: I'm all for convenience ;) ) ~~~ tallanvor I'll admit to being in the 30%. I put my phone and Kindle in airplane mode to save battery power, but otherwise I leave my devices in their normal state. Is it 100% certain that none of my devices could possibly interfere with critical systems on the plane? Well, no, but 99.99% is good enough for me. And for what it's worth, I made my decision based on the available research plus what I learned based on my EE courses in school (my degree is in Computer Engineering, but I still took quite a few electrical engineering courses, including one on traveling waves). ~~~ kbutler > 99.99% is good enough for me 99.99% is 1::10,000. Multiply that by 643 million passengers per year (<http://www.transtats.bts.gov/>), and you get a lot of interference (64,300 passengers whose devices interfere...). I believe that the chance of any typical passenger device interfering with critical plane systems is much less that 0.01%, but we need to be careful with seemingly unlikely events multiplied by large numbers. ~~~ enraged_camel 30% of all airplane passengers never turn off their devices during flights. Now THAT is a large number of devices. How many of them interfered with critical plane systems, and what percentage of that interference caused an accident? This is a situation where we need to move beyond platitudes and run some actual experiments, preferably random controlled trials. Load a couple of planes with several hundred smartphones and tablets each. Have the devices on one plane turned off and the devices on the other turned on. Fly a third plane completely empty as a control group. Measure the interference on all three planes and then compare the numbers. ------ stevvooe If they can come to my seat and tell me to turn off my device because they detected a source of interference, then I will turn off the device. If they can't or aren't willing to detect the source of interference, the real risk is likely dubious. Furthermore, avionics equipment should be and _is_ designed to work despite minor external interference. If a consumer electronics device, such as an iPhone or laptop, could drastically effect the operation of avionics equipment, it should not be considered flight worthy. Granted, certification tests probably don't consider such radiation sources, but the risk is so small its likely its not even worth testing. ~~~ ScottWhigham I'm sorry but your first sentence is just bad logic. Just to play devil's advocate, while you are on the ground/taxi-ing in the plane, let's say that you play a disconnected game (one that is a single player game and requires no connection of any kind). No interference is detected. An hour into the flight, you launch an app that proceeds to send your contact list to their home servers. You surely don't expect the pilots to stop what they are doing and come show you, "Look - here's what the problem you are causing is. Turn off your phone!" The second paragraph - sure, fine. I think that's what we all want to know. ~~~ Karunamon >You surely don't expect the pilots to stop what they are doing and come show you, "Look - here's what the problem you are causing is. Turn off your phone!" No, but I would expect one of the pilots to notice something that looks, smells, or feels like electronic interference, and ask the FA's to make an announcement asking everyone to make sure their devices are off because actual interference has been found and is causing a problem. ~~~ ScottWhigham I agree with you that the FAA has done a poor job of explaining what electrical interference there is, and what it's effects are. I also agree that avionics gear is not so sensitive that an iPhone's connection should harm it. But your argument that the pilot should deal with problems like this in-flight is just a tad bit on the silly side IMO. The typical pilot's mindset is, "Fly the plane but, when a problem occurs, stop focusing on flying the plane and solve/identify the problem. Once the problem is solved/identified, get back to flying the plane." You're effectively wanting to change this to something more like, "Fly the plane but, when a problem occurs, stop focusing on flying the plane and solve/identify the problem except if the problem is 'electrical interference'. If that's the case, ask yet again that people turn their phones off. Hopefully they'll listen this time. Wait for all of the people to comply and, once the problem is solved, get back to flying the plane." It just sounds silly, doesn't it? I think we'd all agree that, if there's a problem with electrical interference during flight, we want the pilot to be flying the plane rather than having him/her wait for the passengers to do anything. Again - I'm not arguing whether this is right/wrong; I'm simply pointing out that the logic of having a pilot wait on passenger behaviors before being able to continue doing his/her job is a bit silly. ~~~ Karunamon Admittedly yes, but I think the average person would have a different reaction to "Hey, someone's electronics are actually causing an actual problem, shut down everything" rather than ignored much like the safety briefing that any air traveler who has flown more than twice can recite from memory. Why? Because anyone who has flown and forgot to put their phone in airplane mode and didn't experience a firey death can attest, the usual warnings lack both urgency and a factual connection to reality. Having them announce "there is a problem due to interference" solves both of these. ------ bsg75 Curious - why are people so damn resistant to turning off their devices for takeoff and landing, given the chance it _might_ be safer? Even in the absence of hard data, I would prefer to ensure all cockpit instruments work with minimal interference, than read another email or send another tweet. Then when data is available to make a conclusion as to the effect or lack thereof, informed decisions can be used to create procedures. People are so attached to their devices that they take any inconvenience towards using them as some sort of rights violation. ~~~ Karunamon Seriously, how hard would it be to set up a rigorous test in an average airliner, noting what interference was detected, how much, and its objective effect on avionics? That's why people are so resistant; the whole thing has the stench of unsubstantiated BS about it. Kinda like the TSA. ~~~ gnaffle They do perform those tests, but they can't account for all potential future electronics devices. Likewise, you can test your database server for all known exploits and it might come up clean, but if you open your firewall you can still be hacked if someone later on finds a new exploit. A security minded person would ask you: "Was it _really_ necessary to open that port, of could you have inconvenienced your developers a little bit and made them use a VPN instead?" Trust me, this isn't the only rule in aviation that seems stupid, but the mindset that results in rules like this has had a positive effect on aviation safety. ~~~ Goronmon _They do perform those tests, but they can't account for all potential future electronics devices._ So, our defense against potentially dangerous future electronics devices is a generic safety announcement at the beginning of the flight with only cursory verification that it was followed? ~~~ gnaffle Yes. This is a trade-off. Do they search your hand luggage for air band radios? No, they don't. That's also a trade-off, even though you could certainly cause interference with one. ~~~ Karunamon It's also logically inconsistent. Either the threat of interference and danger is great enough to warrant bag checks, or it is not, and this threat is overblown like every other "threat" in air travel nowadays. ~~~ gnaffle Of course it's logically inconsistent, but this is the real world and trade- offs like these are made. Same with Lithium batteries, although there have been several confirmed cases of such batteries catching fire in flight they are still allowed. It's just not feasible to ban cell phones and laptops. Likewise, airlines have a "clean cockpit" policy disallowing small talk during landings. Do they monitor the CVRs and fine pilots who break this rule? I don't think so. Will some pilots find the rule exessive and make exceptions? Maybe. But the rule still has an effect, and is in place because of previous accidents where distracted pilots have been a contributing factor. While I think this rule about electronic devices might be too stringent, and that it will eventually change, I don't think the airlines have overblown it. Pilots will handle instrument failures gracefully in 99.99% of all cases, and then there's the fatal accident where some stupid malfunction caused the pilot to screw up (AF447, and many others before). Because they know this is a "numbers game", they try to minimize potential problems, even though they may not be able to eliminate them altogether. ------ tekromancr Wow, Title is a bit misleading; One piece of anecdotal evidence is no evidence at all. I would also like to take this time to bitch about the fact that airplane mode on many devices also prevents WiFi, which is allowed on board many flights. ~~~ shawnc On the iPhone you can just turn WiFi back on after you switch on airplane mode. Simple. ~~~ tekromancr My old nook couldn't do that. I had to have the mobile data on to use the Wifi on the flight. I briefly thought that that might (in a very unlikely scenario) result in my fiery demise, and not putting a particularly high value on my own life, continued to read wikipedia, It wasn't until I considered everyone else on board that I elected to switch back to airplane mode. ------ michaelfeathers That has to be one of the most incomprehensible titles I've ever seen. ~~~ jrnkntl You are right, I changed it now to reflect a bit more what is in the article. [edit] seems like I can't change it anymore. I tried changing it to "Airline industry still divided over usage of personal electronics and their supposed interference" ~~~ ScottWhigham Whew. I was asking myself, "It was changed to 'Turning Off IPhone Critical to Pilots Citing Interference'? That can't be an improvement!" ------ 16s RF is somewhat like magic. Crappy 802.11 devices can cause interference with radios and antennas. I have one computer system that I can't use in the same room with a HAM radio. It causes too much interference. When I shut it off, everything works fine. ~~~ mahyarm That might be power circuit interference or just unshielded power cables. What happens when they are on different circuits? ------ batbomb In these anecdotal reports, I'd like to see whether or not the actual navigation devices have been tested. In my opinion and past experience, it's possible that there actually is interference, but it's very like it's a result of a faulty/fragile board or bad shielding. In that case, it would seem like the prudent thing to do is to verify that it's not the actual device that is faulty/fragile, and routine testing of essential navigation devices should be as important as checking the engine. ------ _mulder_ Like using mobile phones at gas stations, this is an issue I've heard numerous justifications for over the years. One interesting one was the health effects of having 200-300 mobile phones ranging at full power inside a sealed metal tube in the sky. Not so much an issue for passengers, but flight crew on long haul flights subject to these signal levels for 8 or 9 hours several days a week! Obviously Airplane mode would solve this but telling everyone to switch off sounds a better way of enforcing this. Of course this assumes there are any adverse health effects from mobile phones at all, but that's a whole different can of worms. Another 'theory', I've since dismissed, relating to the requirement to switch off particularly at take off and landing, is because a plane load of 300 mobiles roaming between base stations at 400mph can cause the mobile operators a few headaches! ~~~ lawnchair_larry Do you have any idea how much _ionizing_ radiation simply being in the upper atmosphere exposes you to? Whoever made that claim apparently doesn't. They probably don't know the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation either. Which means you should not pay any attention to them. ------ ricardobeat So where are the tests? Actual reports, not anecdotes? The whole FAA report is based on word-of-mouth from flight crew. Surely the industry can spare some change for research in such an important area. ------ ISL Avionics design must be resistant to interference. Unfortunately, perfect resistance is impossible (see GPS and LightSquared). The notion that you should turn off "anything with an off switch" as an open- loop solution to the problem is folly. Short of removing the batteries from a device, it's hardly guaranteed that it is truly de-powered. Furthermore, plenty of things don't have an off switch. Pebble watches run via Bluetooth. I doubt users think to turn them off. It's not an easy problem. Sealing the passenger cabin into a Faraday cage may be the only way to ensure RF isolation of instrumentation. ~~~ duaneb Why isn't the passenger cabin sealed into a faraday cage? I would think that would have been the first thing they would build into a plane once devices that broadcast RF became common. I also am quite bad at classical physics, so I don't know the limitations of such a cage. ~~~ genericresponse Nope, there are windows. That's why your microwave has that grid-looking stuff over the windows. It keeps the cage intact and avoids cooking your eyeballs when you look in. ~~~ duaneb Well I'd be happy to sacrifice a few inches of cloud visibility so I could plug myself in to music and turn off the rest of the plane. ------ WorkingDead Remember that sound your computer speakers made when you put your old cell phone near them? Try landing a plane and listening to direction from the tower with that going on in your headset. Interference is a real thing and mitigating it is just a small inconvenience to the passenger who entrust their lives to their pilots. ------ kbutler Would TSA allow the passengers to carry cell phones on the plane if there were any perceived risk? Passenger electronics are so obviously safe that screening for them would break suspension of disbelief even in the airport security theater. ------ nemesis1637 I have a friend who's a pilot for one of the major commercial airlines. He uses his iPhone during flights all the time (seems to be common among pilots). I guess only the passengers are subject to the regulations. Though, I do realize that the pilots can easily turn theirs off if there's an issue; it's a little harder to track down the phone causing problems if it's one of the passengers'. Regardless, the data doesn't seem to concretely prove that phones are causing any of the problems ------ drcoopster So much misinformation. ------ tocomment My last flight said you couldn't use iPhones during the whole flight even in airplane mode. What's the deal with that? The person next to me just lied and said he had and ipod touch ...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to Choose a Profitable Niche - trevmckendrick http://www.trevormckendrick.com/how-to-choose-a-profitable-niche/ ====== BigBalli Hey Trevor, great second post. I agree with most of what you say but have to point out that you left out a big technique: search trends. what you describe is finding apps that are already there and competing against them. A different approach would be analysing search trends and match against niches with no apps. For example, I remember discovering that paddling was a huge "industry" (as a sport) with ZERO apps. For this, you would use services such as SearchManSEO or mobileDevHQ to identify niche "hotness" or the oldschool SEO way using GoogleTrends/Keywords. hope it helps, Giacomo ~~~ tocomment How exactly would you use GoogleTrends/Keywords to identify niches? ~~~ waterside81 I think they mean if you have a hunch on what might be a trend, check out the search trends on Google. If it's going up and to the right, you might be on to something. ------ relix Trevor, after reading this article I wanted to subscribe to your list because it was interesting, and you sold the future content well. Apparently I was already subscribed from a previous article which I liked as well, so consider this a huge compliment, you're doing great! ~~~ trevmckendrick Thanks! ~~~ Paul_D_Santana I agree. Thank you for this topic series. I look forward to every Tuesday's email! I have to ask though, why bother calculating the daily revenue? If a paid app is in the top 25, isn't that enough of a sign that it is profitable? ------ jamesaguilar The high school stats student in me really doesn't like that regression line plotted against two datapoints. ~~~ trevmckendrick Fair enough. I was just doing an example with two data points. Of course the more points you add the more accurate the line. ~~~ jamesaguilar It's not a matter of accuracy in this case, it's a matter of whether the regression has any meaning at all. Any regression can fit two data points, even a parabola. Of course, there are intuitive reasons to suspect that that is not the actual form of the distribution, but you can't actual show it from data with just two points. But I have to assume that you did more data points when you actually performed this study yourself. Up to that point the methodology is really useful, so don't take this as criticism of the entire post. ~~~ trevmckendrick Got ya. I did do more data points myself. Thanks for the commentary. ------ muzzamike What I found most interesting about this is how outdated the Distimo data is. I have a couple game apps in the Games Trivia category, which is conveniently less popular. According to Distimo, in May of last year it would take roughly 600 dls per day to reach the top 25. We're averaging 1000 downloads a day with each game and neither has cracked the top 60. Amazing how much a difference a year makes. Anyone know if Distimo has done a followup more recently? Thanks for another great article Trevor. ~~~ trevmckendrick I'll have to ask them. I would love an update as well. The good thing is that app downloads have only increased since then, so any estimates based on this data will be conservative. ------ swanson [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.t...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.trevormckendrick.com%2Fhow- to-choose-a-profitable- niche%2F&rlz=1C1CHKZ_enUS430US430&aq=f&oq=cache%3Awww.trevormckendrick.com%2Fhow- to-choose-a-profitable- niche%2F&aqs=chrome.0.57j58.833j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) ~~~ trevmckendrick Thank you. Definitely going to be tweaking my WP config after this week... ~~~ justhw Quick Cache is lightweight and superb, I highly recommend it. <http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quick-cache/> ~~~ ra Or run the DNS through Cloudflare's free plan... you get protection against a range of WP exploits then too. ------ fieldforceapp Agreed, Trevor, good content. And maybe you're going to address in part two, but how does the presence of IAP factor into your considerations. In other words, not just profitability but doesn't business model also matter? Or do you just assume free/paid/freemium apps will be required in any niche and plan accordingly? ~~~ trevmckendrick Great question. My first app wasn't free with IAP, but that's what I highly recommend to do now. It gets you a lot more downloads which helps you rank higher in search results. If you do go with a paid app I'd recommend something people will pay at least $5 for. ~~~ TylerE I wonder at what point there is a backlash here? I know myself, personally, I almost never download "free" apps anymore, because the IAP is so obnoxious. ~~~ trevmckendrick Depends on the IAP and the app really. More importantly we should be careful to extrapolate our behavior to the iOS masses. There's _tons_ of apps I would never spend a dime on that are doing extremely well. ------ drd Trevor, great work, I got another approach performed on Android market. The problem with categories in app markets is that they are high level classifications. Therefore, considering them as niche doesn’t tell us much. I performed a functionality-based analysis. I think this gives us a more precise niche definition. Here is my analysis: [http://www.drdacademy.com/?id=an- analysis-of-the-android-app...](http://www.drdacademy.com/?id=an-analysis-of- the-android-app-market-part-2) By the way I don’t think fitting a curve on two points on your result plot is right. Normally, we need a reasonable sample size. ~~~ nhm This is a really interesting companion to Trevor's posts. Google providing those download "bins" lets us get some great insight into more accurate metrics. Thanks for sharing! ------ the_cat_kittles I feel the need to commend you on a very elegant and resourceful way to reasonably approximate an important piece of information! ~~~ trevmckendrick Thanks. I hope it wasn't a pain to read. Took a long time to boil it down to the bare essentials. ------ dreamdu5t I'm curious, has Trevor McKendrick ever built a business from a niche he identified using this method? ~~~ trevmckendrick Sure have :) Check out this post from last week: [http://www.trevormckendrick.com/my-first- year-in-the-app-sto...](http://www.trevormckendrick.com/my-first-year-in-the- app-store/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Coming soon: A new site for fully free collaboration - eatonphil https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/coming-soon-a-new-site-for-fully-free-collaboration ====== eatonphil Their actual evaluation (including Gitea, Pagure, and Sourcehut) is here [0]. [0] [https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Fsf_2019_forge_evaluation](https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Fsf_2019_forge_evaluation)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Faqt – a lightweight, knowledge base (now for teams) - siavosh https://faqt.co/ ====== siavosh Co-founder here: we posted an individual version of Faqt on HN about a year ago, and we got a lot of great feedback. Chief among them was a collaborative version of the app. After a whole bunch of iterations and a few hundred beta users, we're happy to announce the team version. Let me know if you have any questions!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Vampiric Charger: Any Source to 5VDC - crankylinuxuser https://hackaday.com/2018/07/29/vampire-charger-is-a-rugged-anything-to-5vdc-converter/ ====== zaarn That's quite an interesting project. I've recently discovered the OKI 78SR. It handles about 1.5A of power at 5V and accepts a very wide input range from 7 to 36 V and is easy to hook up. Since I have a lot of 24V supplies it's very ideal for my use cases. Sadly, I can't see if there are any images but for any sort of "universal" power input I would consider several factors to be important; \- Isolation; The power charger should isolate input and output as much as possible, IIRC a common rule of thumb is to ensure that the device can handle a 1kV voltage without the output going above specification voltage \- Noise; Switch mode regulators like the 78SR produce a lot of line noise. I imagine a device like this won't be silent either. In some cases it means no reception of wifi or mobile during charging, worst case you get the FCC or legal equivalent in your country knocking at the door (happened once to me, never buy cheap long-range wifi routers from china) \- Protection circuits; A charger should protect against shorts and overloads or overcharging (I had a wall charger once that was able to detect phones or battery banks overcharging their cells and switch them off while being able to also run basically all normal devices like Portable Harddrives). Protection should also extend to grounding everything properly to protect the users. \- Cost; all of the above must be cheap and durable. Nobody wants chargers that die after 6 months or costs 60$. Worse if it's both. Building and designing chargers or power supplies is hard because you have to deal with any of the above (or in some circumstances with none of them depending on target market).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Do Social Rights Affect Social Outcomes? - barry-cotter https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajps.12421 ====== barry-cotter > While the United Nations and NGOs are pushing for global judicialization of > economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCRs), little is known of their > consequences. We provide evidence of the effects of introducing three types > of ESCRs into the constitution: the rights to education, health, and social > security. Employing a large panel covering annual data from 160 countries in > the period 1960–2010, we find no robust evidence of positive effects of > ESCRs. We do, however, document adverse medium‐term effects on education, > inflation, and civil rights.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
‘Serial’: inside a podcast phenomenon - antr http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/aeb8d37c-7af1-11e4-8646-00144feabdc0.html ====== freshhawk Who would complain about a new outlet for long form investigative journalism that's actually massively popular? This podcast is as great as the commentaries/communities that treat it like Game of Thrones are shallow and stupid. Are there actually people who think that good journalism that gets too popular becomes bad in some way or is this just a way to generate a "hot take" story? "“I’d rather disappoint many, many people than make some conclusion just because I’ve got to make . . . a satisfying story,” she told Slate’s Mike Pesca. “I hope that’s not where I lead all of my listeners but . . . I don’t know.” If she doesn’t provide one, argued Pesca in the same interview, “the internet will rise up in a collective wail” and he pleaded with Koenig to reassure him that Serial would not “wind up being a contemplation on the nature of truth”." Here's the better story, hopefully shithead narcissists like Pesca don't ever try to follow Serial because they would turn it into an exploitative farce. ~~~ dang > shithead narcissists like Pesca Please don't practice this kind of invective on HN. It weakens your comment and degrades the threads. ~~~ freshhawk That's fair. I would remove that first word in retrospect given the norms of HN. I believe that just came out while considering someone demanding the public exploitation of a young persons murder for his amusement. Please mentally substitute "emotionally crippled" for my colorful language.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Reflections of an “Old” Programmer - speckz http://www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2016/reflections-of-an-old-programmer.php ====== delinka I'm a bit older than the author. Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a weekend to look into it. I tend to discover that the core principles are the same, this time someone has added another C to MVC; or the put their spin on an API for doing X; or you can tell they didn't learn from the previous solution and this new one misses the mark, but it'll be three years before anyone notices (because those with experience probably aren't touching it yet, and those without experience will discover the shortcomings in time.) When learning something new, I find that this group implemented with $NEW_THING in a completely different way than that group did an implementation with the exact same $NEW_THING. I have a harder time understanding how the project is organized than I do grokking $NEW_THING. And when I ask "why not $THAT_THING instead?" I get blank stares, and amazement that someone solved the problem a decade ago. Sure, I've seen a few paradigm shifts, but I don't think I've seen anything Truly New in Quite Some Time. Lots of NIH; lots of not knowing the existing landscape. All that said, I hope we find tools that work for people. Remix however you need to for your own edification. Share your work. Let others contribute. Maybe one day we'll stumble on some Holy Grail that helps us understand sooner, be more productive, and generally make the world a better place. But nothing's gonna leave me behind until I'm dead. ~~~ andyjohnson0 Late forties developer here. > Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a > weekend to look into it. There's my problem right away. I can't just "take a weekend" to learn some new shiny thing. I have a partner and children who I want to be with at the weekend. And I'd rather go climbing or hiking or even just go out on my bike, than learn another damn api. Twenty years ago I had evenings and weekends to burn. Now I don't. ~~~ toxik I'm 26, and modulo the kids, this is how I feel as well. I've been programming professionally for almost ten years, and I feel less and less pressure to keep up with the latest packages on NPM or whatever the flavor of the month is. It's much more interesting to know what has been tried before, and why that didn't stick. Like this newLISP thing, why should we suddenly start writing Lisp? The language is older than C, for god's sake. ~~~ progman > why should we suddenly start writing Lisp? The language is older than C, for > god's sake. If so many "modern" languages still copy features from Lisp (hello C++) then why not use the real thing? All those nice "new" features which Python and C++ are praised for (lambdas, closures, list comprehensions) have been available for almost 50 years. Lisp was way ahead of its time. It just lacked the hardware power which we have today. It is still ahead of our time. Consider Lisp macros, Genera and MCCLIM. MCCLIM is an interactive GUI for shells which has been neglected for decades. It is being revived right now to make it available for modern Lisp distributions. Modern Lisp just lacks one thing to be the real deal: a native Lisp Machine. [https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/](https://common- lisp.net/project/mcclim/) ~~~ jerf "If so many "modern" languages still copy features from Lisp (hello C++) then why not use the real thing?" Because if it hasn't "succeeded", for suitable definitions of "succeeded" in 50 years, as an old fart approaching 40 myself my assumption is that there is a good reason. I was much more willing to believe the "everybody else is just stupid and can't see the obvious brilliance" reason when I was younger, but as I've learned more, I've learned just how many factors go into a language being successful. Lisp may have all the features, but there are also good reasons why it has never really quite taken off. That said, it is also true that using languages that bodge Lisp-like features on to the side after several decades of usage is generally inferior to languages that start with them. It's one of the reasons I'm still a big proponent of people making new languages even though we've got a lot of good ones. (I just want them to be _new_ languages somehow; a lot of people just reskin an existing language with a slightly different syntax and then wonder why nobody uses it.) But they've all been listed before, and I don't expect me listing them here will change anything, so I'll skip it here. (I did a quick check on Google Trends; Clojure seems to not be growing. It's not shrinking, but it's not growing. That was Lisp's best chance for growth I've seen in a long time, and that window has probably now closed.) ~~~ progman The reason why Lisp is not mainstream is its power. It makes writing DSLs extremely easy so that everyone can write his own DSL to solve a certain problem. Such style of writing however makes Lisp code unsuitable for group working, and hence unmaintainable. It explains (imho) why there are so many unmaintained Lisp projects. Clojure has a different problem. It is based on the JVM infrastructure which was (imho) an unfortunate decision. Access to Java features is nice but dealing with Java stack traces is not fun. Also the usual startup time of clojure apps in the range of seconds is not acceptable (Tcl/Tk apps start in a fraction of a second). AFAIK clojure is also not suitable for mobile app development. The clojure developers should have used their own VM, or they should have provided a Clojure/Lisp compiler for native compilation. LuaJit has demonstrated how incredibly fast a suitable VM can be. ~~~ optionalparens I have felt some of the pain and gripes you have with Clojure and while I am not denying that some of them are very real, I am not sure if you understand the mentality and philosophy behind Clojure as far as most of us who use it seem to have decided at least. Put succinctly, it is to balance practicality with features to get real work done. Clojure is quite wisely based on the JVM because the idea was not to create a Lisp replacement or a new Lisp, but rather a practical Lisp. Some of the historical problems with Lisp and many other languages like Smalltalk were related to specialized hardware, development environments, and/or ecosystems. Clojure did away with most of these concerns by attaching itself to one of the largest existing environments. Using the JVM was a wise decision that has/had many advantages not limited to: \- Ability to leverage an already huge ecosystem of libraries, tools, servers, etc. that are well-tested \- Already battle-tested and working package system - this is severely underestimated by some popular languages \- Justifying its existence as a tool along side other JVM languages within an organization, not a full replacement \- Existing, highly optimized JIT \- Reasonably fast, nearly for free Originally there were some plans to expand more to other environments, for example the CLR, but the JVM got the most attention and in the end this was practical. As for some of the real drawbacks: \- Clojure alienates Lisps zealots and people who could never grasp Lisp. IMO, this is a stupid person/psycho filter so I don't see it as a drawback but it's worth noting. \- Startup time as you note. Startup time sucks, but it has gotten better and there are workarounds that are the same ones you could use for Java apps traditionally. The mobile dev issue you note is somewhat wrong and without a huge explanation, one option is to more or less enjoy a huge part of Clojure via ClojureScript, or in other words, targeting JavaScript and using things like React Native. \- Garbage. This is an issue of a lot of things on the JVM and Clojure is no exception. You can work around this somewhat with specific coding practices if you need to, but yeah, Clojure isn't going to be good if you can't fathom an eventual garbage collection cycle. \- No TCO, which is mainly a JVM issue if I remember right. This would be great, but it's a tradeoff and Clojure has negotiated this somewhat by providing what I feel is more readable code than when I worked in certain Lisps. \- Some legacy baggage in the standard lib, for example Clojure.zip. Recently they've been more brutal about what can and cannot go into standard libs. Every language though suffers from this a bit. Regarding developing its own VM, I think you again miss the point about practicality. If Clojure did this, it would have been even more years before its release. Moreover, comparing to Lua is a bad example as it is a very different language (yes, I used Lua professionally). Lua achieves a lot by really keeping it simple, and while there is merit to that, Lua leaves a ton to be desired which I won't get off-topic about here. So Clojure could work better in its own VM, but then you'd lose the JVM ecosystem along with many other things. I personally would rather have the ability from the beginning to reach from a huge amount of libraries rather than have nothing but what other people writing the language provide or via crude things like calling back into C. There are many talks about all of this, many from Rich Hickey himself. I think you really missed the point of Clojure and I am more of the mindset that I am glad it exists and not in an ever state of flux so that I can use it today, get things done, and not have it relegated to some research language I could never justify in a workplace. And no, I am not a Clojure zealot, I used about a dozen languages in any given year depending on my project and interests. There's a lot I prefer in Lisp over Clojure, but I see Clojure as taking some lessons from various Lisps rather than trying to be the one true Lisp. ~~~ progman I understand why Clojure deliberately focuses on the Java ecosystem. If I still would be in Java development today I likely would use Clojure. If I were in web development I likely would use Clojurescript. Currently I prefer the Emacs/SLIME/SBCL toolbox which is more responsible (and Nim by the way). My humble two cents to the Clojure team: 1) You should implement a cache mechanism ("save-image") for native code so that at least the annoying startup time of clojure apps is gone. I wonder why Java doesn't support native caches to this day. 2) The weird Java stack trace problem could be solved by providing an individual stack tracer which is close to the source code. I know that this is not possible for Java libraries but at least clojure stack traces should be presented in a more convenient manner. ------ carsongross I get where the guy is coming from, I'm right there as an old guy. On the other hand, I think there is a bit too much fatalism in the article. Sometimes the kids are being stupid, and they need to be told so. The vast majority of web apps could be built in 1/10th the code with server- side rendering and intercooler.js. All this client-side crap is wasted when you are trying to get text from computer A into data-store B and back again. It's the front-end equivalent of the J2EE debacle, but with better logos and more attractive people. And people are starting to wake up[1][2]. It's up to us old guys to show the way back to the original simplicity of the web, incorporating the good ideas that have shown up along the way _as well as_ all the good ideas[3] that have been forgotten. Yes, we'll be called dinosaurs, out of touch, and worse. Well so what? We're 40 now. And one of the great, shocking at first, but great, things about that age is you begin to really, truly stop giving a fuck what other people think. Besides, what else are we going to do? [1] - [https://medium.com/@ericclemmons/javascript- fatigue-48d4011b...](https://medium.com/@ericclemmons/javascript- fatigue-48d4011b6fc4#.uifr5lhm8) [2] - [https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript- in-2...](https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript- in-2016-d3a717dd577f#.rmamjx8hw) [3] - [http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/01/18/rescuing- rest.html](http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/01/18/rescuing-rest.html) ~~~ rlander I can vouch for Intercooler. We're rewriting large parts of our app (used to be a complex flux beast) and it is now way more maintainable and indeed around 1/10th the code. We now keep most of our app state within the server, instead of spread throughout client and server. Of course, it is not end-all-be-all: it solves simple interface problems, those that should't require 200mb of JS dependencies to solve. Once the interface gets complex enough, you should use JS. We've still got a couple of JS components though. ~~~ ehnto Excellent. Intercooler is simple enough that if it goes awry I will just write my own, but if I don't have to then great. But to further your point, intercooler is just a tool rather than an ideological shift in how we execute web applications. The reason I see the whole front end JS infrastructure mess as unintuitive is precisely because my needs are served with back end code and a sprinkle of Ajax. If I were building a complex SPA like an in browser photoshop, I might see more use in the complex ecosystem and try and tackle it. But, from a not-so- outside view it still looks like a mess. ------ bsenftner It is plain and simple, Kids. I'm 52 - been programming professionally since the 70's when I started writing C code and getting paid for it in 5th grade. Our "professional" is writing glue code, and how it is done and what hoops are jumped through simply do not matter: all that matters is the final shipping product, widget, or logical dodad works for the immediate marketing moment. I speak from enviable experience: game studio owner at 17, member of original 3D graphics research community during 80's, operating system team for 3DO and original PlayStation, team or lead on 36+ entertainment software titles (games), digital artist, developer & analyst for 9 VFX heavy major release feature films, developer/owner of the neural net driven 3D Avatar Store, and currently working in machine intelligence and facial recognition. Our profession is purposefully amateur night every single day, as practically no one does their computational homework to know the landscape of computational solutions to whatever they are trying to solve today. Calling us "computer scientists" is a painful joke. "Code Monkeys" is much more accurate. The profession is building stuff, and that stuff is disposable crap 99% of the time. That does not make it any less valuable, but it does render it quite ridiculous the mental attitude of 90% of our profession. Drop the attitude, write code freely knowing that it is disposable crap, and write tons of it. You'll get lazy and before you know it, you'll have boiled down whatever logic you do into a nice compact swiss army knife. And the best part? Becuause you'd stepped off the hype train, you'll have more confidence and you'll land that job anyway. If they insist or require you to learn and know some new framework: so what? you're getting paid to do the same simply crap over again, just more slowly with their required dodad. Get paid. Go home and do what you enjoy. This is all a huge joke anyway. ~~~ nambit You're totally right but then people are faced with the possibility of an increasing number of code monkeys graduating from college every year. Then the question becomes, how do you keep your job year after year when the number of code monkeys just keep on increasing. Some of them are shitty but a lot aren't. ~~~ abledon it seems programmers are one of the most in-demand type of worker right now. I understand the fear of becoming pressured out of a job... but what about every other sector in the economy? I think before our profession's sector becomes threatened, a whole lot of other sectors are going to blow up in a mushroom cloud of automation/obsoleteness (caused perhaps by us!) and force the economy to rethink jobs/food/shelter/basic necessities for everyone. ------ keithnz I started programming when I was 7, I'm 45 next month :) The one thing in the programming world that is almost 100% applicable to almost every article like this ( and many other topics ) is..... it depends. I'm fortunate in that for most all my career I have spanned many technologies from embedded systems to the latest crazes on the web. Mostly what becomes redundant is language syntax and framework. If your programming career is largely centered around these then you become redundant pretty quick (or super valuable when critical systems are built with them then need maintenance forever ). Frameworks come and go so if you spend a lot of time creating solutions that shuffle data from a DB to a screen then shuffle data back into a DB.... then a majority of your programming skills will become redundant relatively quickly. ( maybe a half life of 4 years? ). But often when you are doing this, the real skill is translating what people want into software solutions, which is a timeless skill that has to be built over a number of projects. If you work in highly algorithmic areas, then not a lot of your skills become redundant. Though you may find libraries evolve that solve problems that you had to painfully do from scratch. However that deep knowledge is important. Design, the more complex a system is to engineer (that isn't provided to you via a framework), the more likely you will have skills that won't go redundant. Design knowledge is semi timeless. My books on cgi programming circa the mid nineties are next to useless, but my GOF Design Patterns book is still full of knowledge that anyone should still know. OOSC by Betrand Meyer is still full of relevant good ideas. My books on functional programming from the 80s are great. The Actor model which has its history in the 70s is getting appreciated by the cool kids using elixir/erlang Skills in debugging are often timeless, not sure there's any technique I'd not use anymore. ( though putting logic probes on all the data and address lines of a CPU to find that the CPU has a bug in it's interrupt handling is not often needed now ) ~~~ pjc50 _spend a lot of time creating solutions that shuffle data from a DB to a screen then shuffle data back into a DB.... then a majority of your programming skills will become redundant relatively quickly_ This is kind of astonishing, isn't it? When this kind of "CRUD" data bureaucracy has been going on for decades. There's no fully general solution yet? We're doomed to keep reinventing it regularly? Debugging is really one of the core skills of programming that should be explicitly taught. ~~~ crdoconnor The tech industry has certain weird persistent prejudices. One of them is a prejudicial attitude to "CRUD" despite its importance and relative complexity compared to how it is perceived. Another is a fetish for unnecessary code optimization and scalability. The obsession for newness is another one, obviously. ------ thesmallestcat Hm. The author works for a web/mobile development agency and uses React Native and GWT as examples of the new and the old, respectively. I hope it isn't news to anybody here that this sort of work is a race to the bottom and has such turnover precisely because it's mostly being done by junior developers. Linux systems programming arcana, for instance, doesn't disintegrate so quickly as the ten years the author cites. That's why, after getting into the industry as a frontend web dev, I will only do that sort of work now as a last resort to pay the bills (the other reason is because it's easy/boring as hell, apart from the greater opportunity for mentoring). Doing that sort of work now feels like I am sabotaging my career. ~~~ Zyst Twentysomething year old here, so you know, not like you don't have a point but: >the other reason is because it's easy/boring as hell I legitimately think front end development is not only very fun, it can have some really challenging aspects. I wouldn't think there's any programming challenge that is inherently easier because it's on web as opposed to something else. Of course I bet there are domain-specific tasks (Distributed Programming, Embedded hardware to list some) that are likely harder than web development. But I guess what I'm trying to say is: I don't appreciate you calling what I make a living off, and spend quite a few hours studying weekly 'easy/boring as hell'. ~~~ EpicEng Well, sorry, but... it is. Maybe you find it interesting, that's subjective, but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff. You're not solving hard engineering problems; you're pasting together libraries other people wrote on top of libraries other people wrote (and on it goes) and searching google to figure out why your opaque stack doesn't seem to be working. Developing a good UI is difficult, no question about it, but not for technical reasons. Whether you resent that or not doesn't make it any less true. >I wouldn't think there's any programming challenge that is inherently easier because it's on web as opposed to something else. Not because it's on the web, because front end work doesn't require anything more than knowledge of your toolset and some design sense. It's nearly all "hey, build a UI with some CRUD functionality which is essentially the same as the 100 you've built before, but for this special snowflake customer." Bleh. ~~~ GuiA Honestly when I see what my friends who design airplanes and particle accelerators are doing, I feel like we're all kind of fucking around in software engineering, frontend or not. ~~~ nickpsecurity Try looking into or messing with _actual engineering_ of software instead. You'll get similarly amazing things. Here's a few: [http://www.anthonyhall.org/c_by_c_secure_system.pdf](http://www.anthonyhall.org/c_by_c_secure_system.pdf) [http://www.methode-b.com/wp- content/uploads/sites/7/dl/thier...](http://www.methode-b.com/wp- content/uploads/sites/7/dl/thierry_lecomte/Formal_methods_in_safety_critical_railway_systems.pdf) [https://ts.data61.csiro.au/publications/nictaabstracts/7371....](https://ts.data61.csiro.au/publications/nictaabstracts/7371.pdf) [http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-192/paper08.pdf](http://ceur- ws.org/Vol-192/paper08.pdf) ------ mafribe If somebody had found himself in Edinburgh in 1986 and bumped into a tall gentleman called Robin, who was a bit familiar with this new-fangled thing called computers, and had asked Robin, what kind of programming language should one learn to use these computer thingies, what would Robin have said? Not sure, but maybe something along the lines of "well ... there are many interesting languages, and different languages are suitable for different purposes. But if you are interested, I'm dabbling in programming language design myself. Together with my students I've been developing a language that we call ML, maybe you find it interesting. With my young colleagues Mads and Robert, I'm writting a little book on ML, do you want to have a look at the draft?" Maybe such a person would have chosen to learn ML as first programming language. If this person had then gone on to work in programming for 3 decades, and if you'd asked this person 30 years later, i.e. today, what's new in programming languages since ML, what might have been his answer? Maybe something along the lines of: "To a good first approximation, there are three core novelties in _mainstream sequential_ languages that are not in ML: \- Higher kinded types (Scala, Haskell). \- Monadic control of effects (Haskell). \- Affine types for unique ownership (Rust). Could I be that somebody? ~~~ catnaroek Haskell isn't quite “mainstream”, so I'm taking the liberty to add innovations from other “not quite mainstream” languages: \- Hygienic macros as a scalable tool for extending and redefining languages, and furthermore, making the extensions interoperable with each other (Racket). \- Language support for building reliable massively distributed systems in spite of individual node failures (Erlang). \- General-purpose programming with growable arrays, hash tables and no other data structures (okay, these ones are _very_ mainstream). ~~~ mafribe Good points. ML originally had Lisp-like macros, not sure about hygiene. Note also that one doesn't always want hygiene in meta-programming, although it is nice to have the option of hygienic macro expansion. I explicitly restricted the comparison to languages for sequential computing. There has been a lot of novely in concurrent programming. Arrays and hash tables are data-structures that you can implement as libraries in ML, so I'd say that's not a language issue. Progress in data structures and algorithms has been considerable. ~~~ catnaroek > I explicitly restricted the comparison to languages for sequential > computing. There has been a lot of novely in concurrent programming. Oops, yes, my bad! > Arrays and hash tables are data-structures that you can implement as > libraries in ML, so I'd say that's not a language issue. Yes, but the point is that nowadays we have languages in which it's “convenient” to design entire large applications around nothing but arrays and data structures. Also, that one was snark. > Progress in data structures and algorithms has been considerable. In CS, yes. In everyday programming, regress in data structures and algorithms has also been considerable. ~~~ mafribe regress [...] has also been considerable. Thanks to Moore's law, most programmers even get away with it. And if they don't ... they do big data. ------ dkarapetyan This statement is false > Half of what a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years. and the rest of the article seems to be based on it so it negates much of what is said. Foundational knowledge does not decay. Knowing how to estimate the scalability of a given design never gets old. Knowing fundamental concurrency concepts never gets old. Knowing the fundamentals of logic programming and how backtracking works never gets old. Knowing how to set up an allocation problem as a mixed-integer program never gets old. In short, there are many things that never get old. What does get old is the latest fad and trend. So ignore the fads and trends and learn the fundamentals. ~~~ glandium How exactly are you contradicting that sentence you're quoting? In fact, it seems to me you're confirming it. He didn't say that everything a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years, but that half will. You're only enumerating the half that won't. ~~~ combatentropy I agree with the grandparent, that the writer overstated how much in ten years will be useless. It was almost 20 years ago that I first learned HTML, and since then neither it nor hardly anything else I have learned has decayed: CSS, native JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, PostgreSQL, Apache, and Bash. But I guess it depends on what you try learning. ~~~ tobltobs Things you have learned, but decayed: IE6 CSS fixes, Apache1 configuration file syntaxes, PostgreSQl getOrCreate surrogates, Jquery, ... ~~~ combatentropy > IE6 CSS fixes I didn't really ever learn these. I stuck to simple layouts or used tables, which is fine ([https://www.combatentropy.com/coming_back_to_the_table](https://www.combatentropy.com/coming_back_to_the_table)). > Apache1 configuration file syntaxes I didn't learn Apache until version 2. > PostgreSQl getOrCreate surrogates I never learned these. I don't know what they are. > Jquery This hasn't decayed. ------ smoyer Apparently old is a matter of perspective ... To me not quite 40 is still a young'in. I'm over fifty and just got back from presenting at a major conference. I've managed to say current through 35 years of embedded systems design (hardware and software) as well as a stretch of software-only business. It's really not that hard if you understand your job is to continually be learning. I must be doing it right because often those I'm teaching are half my age. As an aside, I've done the management track and moved back to the technical track when I found it unfulfilling. ~~~ tluyben2 People over 30 feel 'old' every 10 years. That's nothing new; it's not even 'programmers are 20something'; people becoming 30-40-50-60 have all been saying 'now I am old' while we stand to become 90-100 (at least in western EU), so 60 is not that old. 40 (i'm 41) is spring chicken and I look forward to many years telling my younger colleagues that the latest thing, however interesting to learn about, is not always better. ~~~ smoyer I never said that I was old ... One good sign is that my wife keeps telling me to act my age! ~~~ fineline Nobody has any experience of being any older than they currently are, but a lifetime's memory of being younger. Hence most people of all ages feel old. One trick I like to play on myself is to imagine I come back from twenty years in the future. What advice would I give myself? First thing would have to be "shut up about being old! Your life is still ahead of you." I like the other trick too, where I imagine being visited by a teenage me and thinking what he would say about where I'm at. It can be an awkward conversation. Where's the Ferrari? As a less whacky version, pay really good attention to your parents and your kids. ~~~ tluyben2 I use that timetravel trick as well; I never thought I was old (I like getting older so far; so many doors just open that were closed before), but yeah things to tell your younger self; do not hurry so much. Make 10 year+ plans when doing things. I always hurried thinking something would end; I have been running companies since I was 15 and, for instance, the first company I co-ran with my uncle, made educational software for MS-DOS and later Windows 3.11 and then Win95 etcetc. I was in hurry because I thought first MS-DOS would go away and then that Windows apps would go away because web. The software I made then sells well still; it's now over 25 years old... Why did I hurry/worry? Things I thought that would end, like the CMS market 16 years ago (a market my company thrived in) didn't end. They became bigger. If I would've not hurried, I would have less stress at the time and probably be running on a larger scale than that company is doing now. You cannot stand still and for some parts there needs to be a sense of urgency but it doesn't change _that_ much in most markets. Currently I use that to tell my colleagues we need a 10-year plan, not just a 3-5 year plan. ------ iamleppert You don't need to learn React or Angular or another framework. Spend your time getting really good in your preferred stack of choice. That could be a framework or something of your own creation. Do not go to work for a company that only wants to hire people familiar with a specific framework. It's a huge red flag. The work will be boring and the team mediocre. More often than not there will also be culture issues. Great companies who have interesting projects will want to see what you've built in the past; the technology is just a tool. They will trust you to use the right tools for the job, and will respect you enough to let you pick those which you prefer. For legacy systems, it's helpful to have some experience but it's not like you won't be able to be effective if you're good given sufficient ramp up time. In my experience it's far better to hire the smart, motivated engineer who can actually get stuff done and has created high quality software before than someone who is an expert in a specific framework. Also I avoid going to tech conferences about web stuff, unless it's a legitimately new technology. A new way to organize your code and conventions are not new technology, it's just some guy's opinionated way of doing things. And most of the talks are less about conveying useful information that will help you and more about the speaker's ego and vanity. ~~~ clifanatic > Do not go to work for a company that only wants to hire people familiar with > a specific framework. So, filter out 99% of the jobs that are out there? (And 100% of the ones outside of San Francisco)? ------ oldprogrammer52 One of the consequences of this wide-spread ageism is the amount of unnecessary, ill-conceived, and often dangerous wheel-reinvention that 20-something hipster programmers get away with. Exhibit A would be NoSQL. Little more than a rehash of the hierarchical and network (graph/pointer) databases popular in the 1950s before the ascent of relational databases, these systems enjoy increasing popularity despite few, if any, advantages over relational databases besides allowing 20-something hipster programmers to avoid learning SQL and the ins-and-outs of a particular relational database (like PostgreSQL) and allowing VC-backed tech companies to avoid paying senior developers who already possess that knowledge what they're actually worth. If these new data stores were at last as reliable as the older relational databases they are supplanting, it wouldn't be so bad. But they aren't. Virtually all of them have been shown to be much less reliable and much more prone to data loss with MongoDB, one of the trendiest, also being one of the worst[1]. And these systems aren't even really new. They only appear that way to young developers with no sense of history. IBM's IMS, for example, is now 50-years- old, yet it has every bit as much a right to the label "NoSQL" as MongoDB does --and amusingly, it's even categorized as such on Wikipedia.[2] 1) [https://aphyr.com/posts/322-call-me-maybe-mongodb-stale- read...](https://aphyr.com/posts/322-call-me-maybe-mongodb-stale-reads) 2) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Information_Management_Sys...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Information_Management_System) ------ ams6110 _To me, it seems a bit like JSPs of 15 years ago, with all the logic in the presentation code, but I 'm "old", so I assume I just don't "get it"._ No, you get it. It's the people who get excited about stuff we tried and abandoned two decades ago that don't get it. ~~~ place1 So i'm young. What makes JSPs bad, why aren't you using them anymore and what are you using instead? ~~~ bboreham I think it's the "all the logic in the presentation code" that is emphasised as bad, and that is what you saw in typical JSP example code 15 years ago. "Mainstream Java" then tried to sell EJBs as the answer, which was another world of pain. ------ transfire You know, if truth be told, we really haven't come very far. You'd probably be surprised at just how well a modern COBOL system can operate. ([http://blog.hackerrank.com/the-inevitable-return-of- cobol/](http://blog.hackerrank.com/the-inevitable-return-of-cobol/)) In fact, in many ways we've made things worse because not only does the sand keep shifting, there is now way too much sand. Young people come into the field and they want to make their mark. So we are constantly going through "next big thing" phases, some big like OOP, some smaller like React, only later to realize that what seemed so very interesting was really a lot of navel gazing and didn't really mater that much. It was just a choice, among many. I can only hope one day some breakthrough in C.S. will get us past this "Cambrian Explosion" period and things will finally start to settle down. But I am not holding my breath. Instead I am learning Forth ;) ~~~ d23 > I can only hope one day some breakthrough in C.S. will get us past this > "Cambrian Explosion" period and things will finally start to settle down. I genuinely do feel like we're in the stone age in this industry right now. I've thought about it a lot, but of course, it's hard to really get to the good ideas when you can't hop on lot of stepping stones that will be found later and taken for granted. I think a few things will happen. 100 or 200 years from now (if it's even appropriate to think on such a timescale!), we'll have some very large scale, stable data storage systems that people can simply rely on. A few common development paradigms will have thoroughly been cemented in our collective consciousness, and the programmers of the day will be essentially what construction workers are right now, perhaps with a bit more creativity. They'll follow plans and be put into rigid confines when programming with the system, and it'll be scalable from a development perspective. I haven't got much further than that. It's hard to step more than a few layers deep on stuff like this. A lot of the rest of it depends on how things like AI and VR and a bunch of stuff I can barely imagine will pan out. But from a software point of view, I think we're still waiting on a bunch of 100-monkey- style revelations. ------ minipci1321 Very surprised and honestly, even shocked. Not sure what to think about this post, and I am good deal older and been working longer too. Maybe learning is hard for him? He has 2 degrees. In his sig he says he likes to write about making decision, and not a word about intuition, how it builds up in you over years from that seemingly pointless going round in circles? Very little about how we improve in relationships with people (going from 0% skill for many of us), and accomplish even more by making others pull in right direction? I have never wanted to do anything else than what I do. Differently, yes, but no farming / opening a restaurant or an art gallery. Maybe that is the real culprit? Last thing, knowledge does not "afford increased measure of respect and compensation". Adding value, helping people, and solving their problem does. If you have this trail on your CV, maybe that long list of the technologies is less needed. ------ autognosis The fundamentals of computers have not changed all that much. Every assembly language i've learned is still valid, and their respective architectures are still widely deployed. I'd suggest not building a house on sand, and learn the fundamentals of how computers and programming language works. Don't learn anything closed-source. It isn't worth the brainspace. ------ osullivj Very sad that the author aspires to be Martin Fowler. Fowler is an adept populariser of other people's ideas, and he does that as marketing effort for Thought Works. AFAIK he has not originated any innovation over the last twenty years, whether it be patterns, enterprise architecture, microservices, generators, refactoring or agile. Basically he's a corporate shill trolling round the conference circuit drumming up consulting gigs for Thought Works by banging on about the latest trend. If you want to aspire to be someone in the software world how about Brad Cox, Steve Wozniak, Guido, Carmack, or Kay, Ingalls and Goldberg? ~~~ Chris2048 I don't see anything wrong with picking up ideas like that and promoting them, if he didn't rename so many of them... ~~~ osullivj And make it a little clearer that they aren't his ideas, so noobs don't get the wrong impression. ------ d23 At 27, I still feel old in the same regard as a lot of the ways the author is talking about. A lot of things I'm seeing reeks of being a fad. I'd rather avoid naming any technology or framework, but my instinct has been to avoid planting my seeds in soil that's churned up every 6 months and keep an eye toward that which has been solid for a decade and is likely to continue. I don't mind learning a new language -- there are a couple I'm hopeful toward and think could be long-term winners. But I'm not about to waste grey matter on things I suspect will be obsolete before I can even reach mastery. ------ mml This is the first time in history there are a huge number of "old", nay, wizened, programmers around in comparison to young ones. Make of that what you will. As a 40+ programmer, who knows what becomes of those who move into management, I am seeing lots of my cohort falling back into actually making things, as a way to preserve our hard-won value. This makes me happy. And you whippersnappers better watch yourselves ;) ~~~ vanderreeah As a 40+ web dev, who doesn't know what becomes of those who move into management, I'd be interested to know: what becomes of them? ~~~ mml They stop coding, lose their skills, get laid off at some point, and quickly realize that getting hired in as a middle manager is a _lot_ harder than getting hired in as a programmer. ------ dwarman This comes up approximately annually. I used to answer at length. But now at 69 brevity seems more productive. I am probably nearing the end of my accidental unplanned drunkard's walk career, one that start in 1967 when I was dropped (unskilled 19 yr old college hippie drop-out) into the inside (literally) of a mainframe and told to "make it work". wandered subsequently through probably every computing field, and lately do audio DSP work inside game consoles. Inside the inside of a current SOC inside a black box. My conclusion: there is no formula for staying relevant. Perhaps an understanding of the roots and rapid skill acquisition, but beyond that every second I spent learning a new framework just because has been a second wasted. By the timne I was somewhere it was poossibly relevant, it was already dead and replaced or I was too far ahead of the time and had to write my own. Further, and sadly, after 50 some years in the biz, I still understand the insides of current SOC chips, and I shouldn't - no progress has been made in practical computing thoeretics at all. Lots of embellishment, lots of band- aids, nothing really different. Otherwise I would not be able to do this job. Yes, really, brief this time. $0.01 instead of a full $. ------ jrapdx3 A good article that makes valid points about the difficulties of keeping up in rapidly-changing fields. Since I'm "old", and have a foot in the worlds of medicine and programming, it's apparent to me there's not that much difference in the "aging curve" in these occupations. The parallels include the explosion of new knowledge, or at least variations on the old knowledge, that a practitioner needs to keep up with. In programming it's languages and frameworks, in medicine it's discoveries (basic science), new drugs and techniques, and aspects of the regulatory environment. In either case a few years out of school/training it becomes daunting to keep up. I should add here a particular peeve, the proliferation of abbreviations and acronyms is _way_ out of control. It's nearly impossible to read an article without encountering an avalanche of incomprehensible ABBRs. What's worse, the same ABBR is often used to mean entirely different things one article to the next. Cross-field usage is a naturally incongruous extension of the confusion, though at times it's humorous. What the article doesn't emphasize is the blizzard of details to keep up with is just one part of the experience. As years in the trenches becomes decades the value of "time in grade" becomes evident. The ability to size up the demands of a complex problem, to have a clear idea of where to enter the path of its management, and calm assurance growing out of having been down the road before are all won only by virtue of real experience. Having done what I have for 40 years, it took me only 33 years to realize I didn't know what I was doing, and that's when I got really good at it. Therein is an essential wisdom that time and effort alone confer, and can't be gained in any other way. ------ edpichler A guy from Oracle advised me on I chat we had, on early days of the Google Talk. His name was Matthias Weßendorf (I don't forget people I am grateful) and the advice was something like this: "Study software engineering, it's more difficult to change than technology, and you will use it for all your life". I got lucky to have this advice 10 years ago. I did a Master degree on this area and my life changed, my software has high quality, evolve fast and I sleep nice every night with all the "chaos" under control. I can change languages and development processes fast and painless. I think the point is: you have to understand the abstract concepts of technology rather than languages or frameworks. As an example, if you understand Object Orientation, new languages will appear and disappear while your abstract concept will still be completely useful and applicable. If you study software engineering, it does'n matter if you will use scrum, RUP, you will get it fast because you already have all the base. ------ bungie4 Mid 50's here. I've been coding professionally for about 30 years. All of this is pretty much spot on. More so, the ability (and desire) to learn the latest/greatest has waned. I fear that we only have the ability to jam so much new knowledge into our heads. At some point, we must discard the old to make room for the new. I'm just afraid I'm gonna delete the ability to control my bowels. ------ splicer I got a bug report from a 76 year old developer the other day. ------ artellectual I don't think experience is replaceable. There are certain things in software that doesn't change. \- solving the problem at hand. \- solving it in the quickest time possible \- the solution to the problem should not introduce new problems I think for experienced programmer such as yourself the knowledge that you "lose" or "decays" don't actually become useless. I think they will serve you in making better future decisions like for example what you are saying now. Realizing whether things are 'fads' or 'foundational ideas' is a big asset for an experienced programmer. The same way with doctors. Their tools are changing rapidly but the underlying concept is still the same. She may not know about all the new tools but she understands how a heart works, and because of that she can gauge if the new tool is just a 'fad' or will it change how things are done fundamentally. I think every career path has this in some degree or another. ------ keefe I think it's time for this meme about engineering being a young man's game to die. There are plenty of events in the olympics with good competitors in their 30s and early 40s. The point being that we certainly haven't aged out of any physical requirements once we hit our 40s. Sure, I have a little less energy in my 30s than in my 40s, but overall I am more productive and make fewer mistakes. I do agree that keeping skill levels up across a long career is difficult. Maybe these memes come up because it's a convenient excuse not to put the effort in? It's very easy to get complacent if you are smart, get things done and have a comfortable home life. We have to train to get that brass ring, to stretch the analogy ;) ------ progx "The doctor at 40 doesn't seem to be worried about discovering that all his knowledge of the vascular system is about to evaporate in favor of some new organizing theory. The same goes for the lawyer, the plumber, the accountant, or the english teacher." This is the point you think in a wrong direction. All of this Jobs need a basic knowledge (a developer need it too) and all auf this Jobs need tools or regulations to do the job. A doctor need knowledge about new medics, new instruments. A good teacher teaches not the same way for 40 years. ... React or whatever are tools. And yes, the most tools reinvent the wheel and this is not development specific, this is valid for many jobs. ------ dcw303 I'm about to hit 40 as well, and I completely identify with the pressure to keep up to date with new languages and frameworks, with the fact that I've lost memory of many things I haven't used recently, and that despite the proliferation of the new new thing, there really aren't that many new ideas out there. But the thing is, I really like that I must always be learning. I just have that kind of brain that is attracted to learning new things, so for me this career has always been a natural fit. In the last few years I learnt Meteor.js and built an issue tracker from scratch; I made several attempts at gaming projects using C++, C#, Swift, and others; I played Microcorruption and Cryptopals and Starfighter to learn a bunch about assembly, reverse engineering, crypto and security; I learnt Go and built a compiler with it; and right now my attention is moving towards lua to do some pico8 games. I did all this on the side of my boring corporate java developer job, and for no other reason than I wanted to learn new things. (OK, maybe I had big dreams of a startup with the issue tracker, but the others were purely for fun.) I'm probably never going to be well known for any of those things, and I really haven't built up the chops to be considered an expert in any of them. But I'm content being a dilettante. Perhaps one day I'll get exhausted of exploring new things, but until then it's just fun to just dabble in whatever takes my fancy. ------ kkanojia A lot of old guys(40 is old eh!) I meet are into managerial/advisory roles and even though they wont know the underlying details of the framework it does not take them much time to understand it, because there is always something similar they had during their time. The time I spent mastering, adobe flex, javas struts framework, GWT and the likes. Could seem like wasted time. But in the larger scheme of things it just made me smarter. I know what worked for them and what didn't and that helps me understand the future frameworks better. ------ zelos "...invest most in knowledge that is durable. My energy is better spent accumulating knowledge that has a longer half-life - algorithms, application security, performance optimization, and architecture" That's the key quote, I think. There seems to be far too much focus on 'programming knowledge' being about new frameworks, languages etc. That's just ephemera. Picking up React Native takes what, a couple of weeks? The basics are still the same, and still far more important. ~~~ Chris2048 Too many cooks spoil the broth, if everyone shunned frameworks in favor of rolling their own things would be even more of a mess - except in JS which has all sorts of problems whichever way you go.. ------ patkai I'm also a bit older and have had a 10 year academic career followed by 10 years of software contracting. The biggest difference between academia and current web development - not sure of "other" software development like embedded code, systems languages - that in academia: 0\. you went to school, did some homework (not that it's all so useful, but at least you have a background in what you are doing, and a common denominator / language with your peers) 1\. before you start something new, you do a thorough review, or read a lot of review papers, so you do know what was done before and why 2\. you do get mentorship, even if Phd students / postdocs often complain about the lack of it. But directly or indirectly you do test your ideas on people who know more and who have been there longer 3\. you start to send preliminary workshop / conference papers for review, and also funding applications 4\. at this point you at least know why SQL - or whatever else - is there, and in some cases you might even learn some humility I guess my conclusions are trivial. Many of us have amazing technical skill but our education and experience is not on par. It results in a lot of waste, of time and quality. ------ staticelf I understand the analogy with the doctor but I don't think it is true at all. I don't think programming is different from most fields actually. Perhaps concepts in programming change more rapidly than in other fields but technology ascends there too. For example I've heard dentists discuss new tech and methods they use as if it was a new web framework with different thinking. Doctors need to learn about new methodologies all the time since science and technology discover new shit all the time and develop new methods to finding and fighting diseases for example. I think most people would be extremely disappointed if they visited a doctor that gave them medical advice that was 40-50 years old and wasn't updated with more modern medicine. All technology is a means to an end. You don't have to learn the new tools to complete the job if you can have the same outcome and I think many times people are so afraid to become less relevant that they learn stuff they don't actually need. If you really benefit from learning something, that's when you should learn it and use it. ------ ensiferum This is why you let the javascript fanboys come and go with their "angularjs". You can focus on tools that do not change so much. Just to name a few, C++ (slowly updates), C, posix, Qt and many other native technologies that have a good "shelf life" of at least nearly 5-10 years with only casual update. Further on, the core of computer science has even better shelf life. It basically never expires. Personally I split two things. The stuff that I need to learn just _now_ to get my current work done, and the stuff that matters in the long term. The former can change quickly and I don't fuss about it. If It's the buzzwords and latest tech gimmicks or just a new technology I didn't use before, I learn as much as I need to and as much as sticks naturally over the course of my work, but I don't always actively try to retain it. The latter part however is the real "gold". Once you know the core computer sciency stuff you can always build on that later on using whatever tools and technologies. ------ agentultra I find that this pace is a symptom of the Javascript culture of popularity. It is a hallmark achievement in the career of a Javascript developer to be the maintainer of a popular library or framework and monetize their popularity by way of training videos, talks, books, and buy-in from companies building upon their work. It's not that frightening to me, a mid-30's developer, at this point. I find the fundamentals are more important than the fads and it's relatively easy for me at this point to separate the wheat from the chaff. Is Redux or the Elm architecture good? Yes -- it's a left-fold over a state tree; great! I want that. Are new things coming out constantly? Yes. Some of them are incremental improvements. That's a good feature to have. It means there are a horde of passionate people constantly improving the tooling and libraries available. I wish some of my preferred languages received even a fraction of the attention that JS gets. We live in interesting times. ------ szines Nice article. Thank you. We should never stop learning... Interesting, I found this writing also, which is about new frontend frameworks: [https://medium.com/@edemkumodzi/how-to-choose-a- javascript-f...](https://medium.com/@edemkumodzi/how-to-choose-a-javascript- framework-to-learn-a265c55f1271#.ltchkty24) About How to choose a framework... and it suggest, if you already an experienced dev, who prefer OO patterns and you believe in serious computer science, you should use Ember.js. If you are a designer, Angular is good for you. However, if you are young and you don't have any experience, go with React, because it is easy to learn... like PHP back in time... I'm afraid React will be the new PHP, because we will see a full generation growing up with mixing logic with view, and they follow this kind of patterns... :) ------ rb808 I recently went for a C++ job which I hadn't done for 10 years. Most of the questions I was asked were the same ones we had in interviews in the 90s. It actually felt really nice, I just wish there were more good C++ roles around - would be nice to live in a world that doesn't radically change every few years. ------ eikenberry > To me, it seems a bit like JSPs of 15 years ago, with all the logic in the > presentation code, > but I'm "old", so I assume I just don't "get it". He seems to ignore that his experience just paid off. It is not that his knowledge of JSP is out of date and not useful, it is that back in the day he learned the anti-pattern and can apply that now. Programming has the same long term advantages as any profession. Most of what I know after 20-some years is not any specific tech, but ways of doing things, recognizing good and bad habits, patterns, etc. The specific techs come and go, but the real knowledge transcends them all and builds on itself. His 3 stages graph shouldn't logarithmic but exponential. ------ dep_b I don't know. I'm in this still somewhat hot new thing called mobile and now I'm supposed to understand how to debug C-code and all that "old bullshit". It even drops me into a view sometimes that's straight from my C64 assembler cartridge full of labeled MOV, LDA calls and all that stuff. I really wish I dug a bit deeper then than writing adventures in BASIC back then! I don't think knowing how a computer actually works will ever go out of fashion. Now there's Falcon framework for PHP for example, full of speedy functions written in C by smart people that actually knew what was happening beyond the stuff they typed into their .php files. ------ markbnj As a working developer and SRE at 55 years of age I can't help being just a little amused at the author. I guess you really _are_ as old as you feel. The points about the competence cycle over the span of a career are dead on, of course. ------ rmason Only in two professions pro athletics and computer programming is forty years old. ~~~ WildUtah _Only in two professions pro athletics and computer programming is forty years old._ Also, forty is old in the oldest profession that those two most resemble in their degree of exploitation and social stigma. ------ whybroke We work in a surreal field were knowing a bit of Node.js and nothing else is considered superior to knowing a bit of Node.js and alot of .NET Obviously you may substitute any fashionable/unfashionable language pair in the above. ------ prewett I make a point of not learning the new framework du jour. (Back in The Day it was the next UI frame Microsoft was putting out.) If I keep hearing about it for a few years, I figure it might be worth looking into. I starting writing new sysadmin scripts in Python instead of Perl after I kept hearing about it, for instance. Other than that, I tend to learn on a need-to-know basis. I feel like that has led to little churn in my knowledge. But then, I also try to avoid working in areas that have high churn, which has led to my experience being in areas of low churn. ------ muzster I remember those novice days with fond memories. I've observed, in the twilight hours or when I'm playing with my kids, that I am attracted to things that make me feel a novice. However, this is not compatible with my day time job, where my paid expertise is often required. _sigh_ It would be interesting to see the graph of the careers stages with happiness overlaid. Source: [http://www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2016/career-stages- program...](http://www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2016/career-stages- programmer.png) ------ mti27 "And then one day you find, ten years got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun..." To the author: Hang in there, man! You're just feeling the time crunch, now that you have kids and other responsibilities. Based on your age, it would have been the mid-1990s when your professional career started. Back then, the economy was a lot better and outsourcing hadn't yet taken over at large companies. It's a little more dog-eat-dog economically, but your brain probably still works fine. Just take a breath and keep going. ------ partycoder Well, first of all, new shiny things are not really new at all. The principles behind them have been around for decades. Learning 30 different imperative languages (c, pascal, ada and descendants) might not add as much value as learning an imperative language, a functional language, a logic programming language, a language emphasizing concurrency (go, erlang), etc... meaning, learning paradigms and high level design constructs not syntax. Try to stay in touch with new paradigms, instead of just new applications of them. ------ euske I recently found that every programmer has to discover what it is like to create a new exciting thing and watch it fades into obscurity. i.e. Life is all about reinventing your own wheel. ------ sbt The second advice, investing in durable skills, is key. In addition to what the author mentions, I would point out that more change happens higher in the stack. There is relatively little change at the x86, C, operating system level, entrenched protocols. But once you start getting into the higher level languages, and in particular web, the churn is much greater. So personally I'm trying to stay away from those higher levels. ------ LeanderK As a CS-Student i can not imagine going into a profession that you can just learn in some university and then just work in it. For me this seems rather absurd, that you can stop learning. You just have to manage that there is always something new to learn and something you know going obsolete. Thats the way life works, at least in the view of an CS-Student. ------ justinhj I'm 45. Feels like there are 1000 directions I could go to improve my skills, from soft skills to different programming models and industries. As long as someone will pay me to, I will program for money, and when they stop paying me I'll keep on learning and coding for fun anyway. ------ patsplat As an "old" programmer myself am a bit disappointed in the takeaway that jsx is a templating language. State management is the more important topic and the React tool chain has some great options for addressing it. ------ m3kw9 Depends where you work, some will help you gradually learn new stuff. But if you are a contractor, you'd need to learn to keep up. That's why hey are paid more ------ tempodox I roughly concur with the OP's thoughts on the matter. Which makes programming more than just a profession to me. It is, if you will, a way of life. ------ samfisher83 Only in tech would late 30s be considered old. ------ flamelover So get a copy of sicp, there is _almost_ nothing new to you. (Yes, I am going to start a fire :), bite me honey) ------ nirav72 If this guy thinks he's is old at being shy of 40..I must be really old at almost 45. ------ br3w5 Is this a Freudian slip? "feeling apart of a community of technical" ------ DanielBMarkham I agree mostly with the author. The only quibble I might have is this: _We realize that it 'll require real effort to just maintain our level proficiency - and without that effort, we could be worse at our jobs in 5 years than we are today._ If by "worse", you mean more forgetful of the details of latest fads? Sure. But definitely not less able to put together solutions (Not if you've been spending your time doing that, of course) When you're a kid and fresh into programming, everything you pick up has some magical power to do all sorts of awesome and cool stuff you've never done before. It's a grand adventure and you're just collecting all the trinkets you can on the way there. You look to other programmers to see which ones have the most potential. Whatever job comes along, you've already got the solution in your toolkit. Over time you begin to realize that many, many problems have been solved hundreds of times. You note that there is an ecosystem around tools and frameworks, and as a developer? You are a market for lots of people who want you to use their stuff. That there's quite a bit of social signaling going on around which languages and tools people use. I'll never forget the first time I heard somebody say about another programmer "He's a nice guy, but he's just a VB programmer." Actually he was one of the best programmers I knew at the time. He programmed in many different languages. It was just that for the work he was doing, VB was the right tool. But that's not the way it looked to the cool kids. Know what's sad? It's sad when you look back 10 or 20 years and remember a ton of effort and pain you went through to fuck around with WhizBang 4.0 only to see it replaced by CoolStuff 0.5 -- and then you realize that CoolStuff really wasn't all that much of an improvement. And then you realize that CoolStuff is no longer cool. And then you think of the hundreds of thousands of manhours coders spent mastering all of that and comparing notes with each other. Looking down on those poor folks who never made the switch. Makes you kinda feel like an asshole. I think you lose a lot of detail recovery ability as you get older, no doubt. I keep very little implementation detail active in my memory and only dig it back out as needed. But we are communicating on this wonderful little forum that, last I checked, was built using html _tables_! Yikes! And using a language that's a derivative of LISP! Yet somehow the world keeps spinning around. I have no doubt that as you finally smarten up and focus on the important stuff that you will appear to other, perhaps younger programmers as losing it. I just don't think they know what the hell they're talking about. Meh. ~~~ tempodox > I just don't think they know what the hell they're talking about. Same here. But if you tell people their big wide world looks like a rather small box from your perspective, you'll discover that killing the messenger is very common. Even among folks who consider themselves educated and enlightened. ------ vacri > _The doctor at 40 doesn 't seem to be worried about discovering that all his > knowledge of the vascular system is about to evaporate in favor of some new > organizing theory. The same goes for the lawyer, the plumber, the > accountant, or the english teacher._ And the same is true of programming. There are still variables, arrays, syntax errors, IDEs and so forth - the underlying algorithms don't change that much. Lawyers and accountants _have_ to keep up to date to keep their credentials, and doctors almost always do (but not actually always - just like some programmers don't update their skills). Fads come and go in teaching as well. I know less about plumbers, but there are few white-collar professionals where you don't have to keep on top of things throughout your career. From architects to engineers to social workers to pilots to biologists to meteorologists to managers, things change in your profession and you need to adapt. It's just that usually those changes don't have the ridiculous levels of hype and fanfare that they have in our bubble (management being an exception here as well, lest I draw the wrath of a six-sigma black belt!) ------ oldmanjay Reading over the comments here makes me want to hug everyone and carefully explain that complaining that you want to dedicate less time to your craft and still get the outsized rewards you feel you deserve just for being old isn't going to convince anyone to hire old programmers. ------ abritinthebay Dunning-Kruger right here folks. ~~~ sctb We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12657534](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12657534) and marked it off-topic. Please comment civilly and substantively or not at all. ~~~ abritinthebay Oh please, you just confirm what the industry already knows about HN Such a joke. ------ EpicEng Please. Reduction to absurdity isn't a valid argument. Are those folks working at large scales? Are they tuning DB's for applications which have to handle hundreds of thousands or millions of transactions per second? I don't imagine you actually know what you're talking about here. ~~~ WildUtah _Reduction to absurdity isn 't a valid argument._ The Wik says Aristotle called it " _ἐις ἀτοπον ἀπαγωγή_ " and _reductio ad absurdum_ has been considered an important and valid form of argument for at least 2500 years. [0] [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum) ~~~ EpicEng That's nice. Not here though. Equating the technical complexity of learning a UI framework and designing back end systems is just silly and you know it. This is also not a form of reductio ad absurdum which fits the definition; it's just a silly linguistic reduction which excludes many important details. ~~~ orly_bookz You're like a living version of this comic but for IT nerds... [https://xkcd.com/435/](https://xkcd.com/435/) (Just to be clear, in the IT version, you're _not_ standing where the mathematician is.)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: DocHUB – An easy way to create dynamic project docs with Markdown - knutmartin https://restdb.io/templates/dochub-markdown ====== srpeck Interesting. I had not seen FlatDoc ([http://ricostacruz.com/flatdoc/](http://ricostacruz.com/flatdoc/)) before. Similar purpose to what I was aiming for with Benchpress CMS (demo: [https://srpeck.github.io/benchpress/](https://srpeck.github.io/benchpress/) and repo: [https://github.com/srpeck/benchpress](https://github.com/srpeck/benchpress)). Not a huge fan of putting all the page-building client-side though and breaking the lightweight HTML web, regardless of how fast it can be. ------ jlpdyh s/sentral/central/	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: HN'ers / startup scene in Chicago? - mindcrime I'm going to be staying in Chicago for a good portion of the new few months.... while I'm here, I'd love to meet any Chicago based fellow HN'ers, as well as getting to know the local startup scene. If anybody would like to meet for a drink, I'll definitely buy you a beer or two if you give me a shout. Or if anyone just has any recommendations for events/ groups / meetups in the area, I'd love to hear about it.<p>And, of course, recommendations vis-a-vis entertainment / dining / etc. are always appreciated as well.<p>Looking forward to making some new friends here in Chicago! ====== tstegart We're up in Milwaukee if you ever make it that far north. As for recommendations, I'd check out the Frontera Grill. Its the restaurant for Rick Bayless, the PBS cooking show dude and the food is great. The sit down area is expensive but the carryout place has cheaper street food type offerings and it is AMAZING. <http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/xoco.html> ~~~ krsgoss He's also got a restaurant in the Marshal Field's food court. I can't remember the name but it was tasty. Lower price lunch type fare that beats the hell out of the usual stuff. ~~~ mindcrime Gnarly... I'll look for both of those and check them out. Thanks! ------ dgunn My startup launches in Chicago the beginning of april. We do social dining if you're interested. <https://soupnextdoor.com>. I live in NYC so I won't be at many event in Chicago. But if you ever want to go to one, email me first and we can meet up. email is in my HN profile. ------ webbruce <http://builtinchicago.org> <http://www.entrepreneursunpluggd.com> <http://technori.com> \- check out technori pitch ------ simpleloss Hey guys, I'm in Chicago this week as well. I would be down to hang out. I'm from NYC but have been living in Atlanta for the past few months, so I'm really happy to be in a 'real' city again. ------ kapilagarwal Hello Phillip, I'll be sending you an email with a startup idea within 24 hours. Right now I am very busy. It'll require proper drafting. Watch out for it. Bye, Kapil. ------ ahasija I'm based in downtown Chicago. Whats ur email? ~~~ webbruce Hey @abasija. What are you working on here? Hit my email bcackerman AT gmail	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Vuvuzela: private messaging system that protects metadata - 0xmohit https://vuvuzela.io/ ====== mi100hael > To hide metadata, messages are routed through multiple servers, and each > server adds noise. This makes the metadata incomprehensible, even to > powerful nation-state adversaries. I'm interested to learn more about these servers. Can anyone host one? How are they discovered/networked? Personally I'm still more inclined to stick with Ricochet.IM since it piggybacks Tor so there are already tons of servers out there. ~~~ throwaway09987 I'm curious about ricochet, but not excited about a service that is integrated with Tor...I've heard a lot of things recently about Tor's insecurity. If this new thing is better about protecting users (as it seems it might be), then I'd definitely stay away from something interfacing with Tor. ~~~ mi100hael A lot of the high profile stories about people being busted over Tor recently have been related to vulnerabilities in FireFox/Tor Browser Bundle and the FBI running honeypots that can exploit those vulnerabilities. Ricochet works by essentially starting up a Tor Hidden Service and then listening for messages from other users, so there's no exposure to browser- based attacks. It's end-to-end encrypted and less susceptible to traffic analysis attacks because it never hits an exit node. ~~~ wheelerwj honeypot has to be the most generous name for "federal government controlled and operated pedophilia distribution network" ever. ~~~ digi_owl Brings new meaning to the adage about how online men are men, women are men, and kids are fbi agents... ------ bbanyc What an appropriate name for software that hides a signal in the noise. Nothing can be heard over a vuvuzela. For those who didn't watch the 2010 world cup, or have blocked out the memory: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKCIFXqhLzo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKCIFXqhLzo) ------ mtgx Couldn't Matrix clients adopt this as well, if only as an opt-in feature? Perhaps some clients could even use it by default, and then if such a client talks to a different client that has the feature opt-in, it would be automatically enabled for the opt-in client, too. I imagine this would work better for Matrix due to its federated nature than it would for Signal. The sub-2 seconds latency doesn't seem that bad, if it actually offers strong anonymity at that level. I would've thought it would be more like 15-20 seconds, which would probably be useless for all but the actively under attack targets. ------ ycmbntrthrwaway The paper was published October 2015: [https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/vuvuzela:sosp15.pdf](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/vuvuzela:sosp15.pdf) Also, previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10668494](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10668494) ~~~ tn_ \|Vuvuzela: Scalable Private Messaging Resistant to Traffic Analysis Their server is throwing a 500 error ~~~ probinso that means that its working with perfect privacy ------ zmanian Vuvuzela seems great except your anonymity is guaranteed by a set of high availability and capacity servers. Those servers need to independently operated and resistant to global compromise. We don't really have a good template for a system like this. We have centralized HA systems and decentralized high churn systems like Bittorrent and Tor. I've been intrigued by the observation that forthcoming "proof of stake" blockchain systems have very similar requirements in terms of availability and capacity to anonymous messaging systems. I wonder if we can use the nodes in a PoS system to bootstrap an anonymity system like Vuvuzela. ~~~ nickpsecurity My model was using ideologically different people in competing jurisdictions whose company's products are used by governments and big business for critical stuff. Such reducing subversion risk plus aligning incentives of attack and defense a bit better. Diverse, hardened OS's & CPU's too. Verified protocol stack. The usual. ------ aftbit There's very little on the Github page - 18 commits, with the last "real" commit (not just an organizational change) being in September. This might be a thing some day, but right now it's just another clever idea. ~~~ 0xmohit There may be even lesser activity now, given that the author has moved to Google. ~~~ lazard Only temporarily. I'm interning on the Go team, but still working on Vuvuzela and Alpenhorn in my spare time. ------ Kenji I love this! The only thing it would require in addition is if it was serverless and p2p, like torrent. ~~~ ycmbntrthrwaway It is impossible to build anonymity system without some sort of centralization due to possibility of Sybil attack. You need some trusted entity beforehand, otherwise your ISP can just simulate the whole network for you and never let you connect to the real network without you even noticing this. ------ arkadiyt FWIW here is the only data that Signal had available to turn over when requested by the government: [https://twitter.com/whispersystems/status/783325788883955713](https://twitter.com/whispersystems/status/783325788883955713) ~~~ libeclipse I wonder, why even store those two pieces of information? I mean, they're not exactly essential. ~~~ recordkeepin33 Pure speculation, but backend tidying? if ( days between acct creation and last check-in > N Days ): archive record; rm prod record; There may be less identifiable means for these boring operations though. Just the first thing that popped into my head. ------ AdmiralAsshat HN hug of death might be throwing it off. I'm getting a '500 Internal Server Error' when I try to visit the link. Here's the GitHub page: [https://github.com/vuvuzela/vuvuzela](https://github.com/vuvuzela/vuvuzela) ------ thinkMOAR Interesting system, and neatly picked name. Though where can i find more information about knowing who you are talking to is really who you think you are talking to? ------ mooneater Awesome. What I want in addition, is for others to never know Vuvuzela has been downloaded, installed, or used. That has implications up and down the stack of course. But otherwise, this knowledge is enough to flag users of privacy protecting technology. ~~~ vxNsr Could you comment on how that would work? I'm trying to imagine how I would hide that I downloaded an app on a phone using the appstore (unless you want this to end up like PGP, which is used by the crypto community and no one else because of the perceived complications vis-a-vis implementation.) ~~~ telesilla Embed the app in seemingly innocent other apps? If there were a raft of say, free useless game apps, there would be the element of innocence there, such as "My mother downloaded Patience, no idea it contained Vuvuzela" ------ niftich I read their slides, and am reading through their paper. How is this different from steganography? In my understanding, the set of all communiqués between every user and the Vuvuzela network approaches pseudorandom noise, among which the actual conversations are hidden. ~~~ ozi steganography is a concept; vuvuzela is an implementation of that concept ~~~ ape4 With steganography you make your message look like something else (eg a text message inside a JPEG). But vuvuzela isn't doing that. They are making it look like noise, I guess. But who transmits noise. ~~~ netik Well, that's exactly the problem with systems like this. If you transmit something that looks like noise, and no one else sends something that looks like that particular kind of noise, then you are raising a flag that says "No, really, please, capture this data, it's interesting." ~~~ estebank How can you differentiate between different "types of noise"? If the traffic is cryptographically sound, the signal is indistinguishable from the noise. If the messages from multiple people have a guessable seed, in such a way that you can identify what is noise, it just means that the system is not cryptographically sound. ~~~ dom0 > How can you differentiate between different "types of noise"? If the traffic > is cryptographically sound, the signal is indistinguishable from the noise. Message length, relative timing, average bandwidth, ports used, source/destination addresses, activity punch-card. I'd assume that this kind of traffic is identifiable to within near perfect certainty, which would also make it easy to block. The situation is a bit similar to early crypto-analysis: it's totally easy to devise a cipher that makes text look random to the eye, but is still easily cracked using statistics (eg. frequency method). Just because traffic patterns _look_ all complex and random doesn't mean that there is a meaningful amount of entropy in it (but you need a lot of entropy to hide all the metadata - who with whom and when). Just because bandwidth or packet frequency _looks_ independent of user activity it doesn't mean that it actually is. ------ emblem21 Related: [https://github.com/Emblem21/spartacus](https://github.com/Emblem21/spartacus)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Game of War: Fire Age Translates Players’ Chat - solarmist http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/arts/video-games/game-of-war-fire-age-translates-players-chat.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& ====== solarmist This game is launching on the 24th.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Thoughts on Ada and Language Technology in Our Times (2012) [pdf] - plumeria http://www.ada2012.org/files/Thoughts_on_Ada.pdf ====== Animats I received the green postcard announcing that "Ada is Green", meaning that of the four candidates for Ada, the Green design had won. That was a long time ago. The big problem in the early days was getting a compiler. DoD had a test suite for the compiler, and only compilers that passed could use the Ada name. They also had a "floor equals ceiling" rule - no missing features, no extra features. Compilers were to be feature-compatible. That's how aerospace does things. The interface spec defines the interface. If something is incompatible with the interface, it's defective. It's why you can take Pratt and Whitney engines off a 767 and put on GE or Rolls Royce engines. DoD took the position that a compiler was a part with a specification. Ada was a big language back then, and some of the compiler companies underestimated the job. Ada compilers were quite expensive - one for the M68000 was $40,000. I ordered that one when I was with a big aerospace company. When it showed up as a magnetic tape, it came with an unexpected cover letter, saying that this wasn't a validated compiler, and the validated compiler would follow - someday. No go. Quality control reject. Red tag attached: "REJECTED BY INCOMING INSPECTION - DOES NOT CORRESPOND TO SPECIFICATION". Purchase order says "validated compiler". Tape returned to vendor. Vendor tries to get out of giving refund. Legal department hammers vendor until they pay up. Meanwhile, another vendor ships a validated compiler, and that is ordered and used. That's how aerospace used to do things. The compiler price was a big problem for non-Government customers. That contributed to the lack of adoption. We had great hopes for Ada, having used Modula successfully. But it was not to be. ~~~ RogerL Yes, and those non-validated compilers, and even the validated ones, had lots of bugs. We had to get legal with a compiler vendor because of the number of bugs. This took disassembling the compiler on our end to prove our points. "Ada is safe". Yes, if it outputs correct code. Otherwise, not so much. Lives were at stake here, and like you say, I'm not sure all the vendors were prepared for what that meant in terms of their product. I really enjoyed working with Ada, but don't think I would want to go back to it today. ~~~ nickpsecurity This is true to this day per IRONSIDES paper [1]. Made me consider using Ada as an executable specification language to be converted to equivalent C/C++ and compiled that way. They need to just do a functional implementation of the compiler in a language such as Ocaml with extensive testing. That's what Esterel did for SCADE generator. They said Ocaml compiler stages were easy to trace down to object code. So, that helps with the chicken and egg problem a bit. Alternatively, implement it in the VLISP, PreScheme, or VeriML that were formally verified for correctness. [1] [http://ironsides.martincarlisle.com/globecom_2012.pdf](http://ironsides.martincarlisle.com/globecom_2012.pdf) ------ nickpsecurity Good article. It was indeed too far ahead of its time. That's despite compelling benefits in the field it's designed for: [http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe- secur...](http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe-secure/) Interestingly, languages such as Rust are still trying to accomplish the combination of efficiency and performance Ada has been doing for decades. Meanwhile, Ada developers (esp at AdaCore) haven't stood still: Design by Contract, provable absence of certain errors in SPARK code, more programming in the large support, zero-runtime deployment options, web app support, separation kernel runtimes for highest security, and more. So, it might be a verbose, old language. It might not support the latest 1,000 fads in IT. Yet, here is a language designed in the 80's that does what modern systems languages are attempting to do, does it well, and has great tool support. So, I'd say the case for using Ada is long-made and companies doing mission-critical software have plenty reason to try to use it. Just try a project or two to see its benefits, at the least. ~~~ jk4930 I have to add that verbosity serves a purpose here. Programming in the large often means those systems are long-living and the teams programming and maintaining them are huge, heterogeneous (in skill), and changing (esp. if it's a system running for decades). The verbosity comes from making many things pretty explicit and clear. Ada is not made for explorative hacking or intellectual workouts but for reliable implementation. And it's not that those who criticize its verbosity program in APL themselves. ;) ~~~ pron > Programming in the large often means those systems are long-living and the > teams programming and maintaining them are huge, heterogeneous (in skill), > and changing (esp. if it's a system running for decades). The verbosity > comes from making many things pretty explicit and clear. I would say that this is the rule, rather than the exception, in software, and the fact that languages designed for "explorative hacking or intellectual workouts" eventually make it into production is simply a matter of inexperienced, though bright, developers prioritizing initial development cost over maintenance cost (which makes sense in startups, but those are a tiny minority of the industry). The average production codebase lifespan is about a decade, probably more. I also agree that verbosity (up to a reasonable point) assists in maintaining codebases over time. ------ _kst_ A minor point: I found the references to "Ada 1.0", "Ada 2.0", "Ada 3.0", and "Ada 4.0" distracting. I worked with Ada for a long time, and I've never heard of those terms. The successive language standards are almost universally referred to by the years they were published (1983, 1995, 2005, and 2012). ~~~ nickpsecurity I agree and think it's slightly major. It's hard enough to get word on this language out. Having people Google for Ada 3.0 or 4.0 to get confusing results might make people say screw it. The author should revise the paper with the proper names for the sake of those people. ------ nigwil_ I would like to highlight that the first validated Ada language processor from 1983, the NYU Ada/Ed interpreter is still missing, along with its associated toolchain (an early SETL compiler for VAX/VMS implemented in a FORTRAN-like language known as LITTLE), more details are on my webpage: [http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/a/retrocomputingtasman...](http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/a/retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/home/projects/spg/ada) There are also several other interesting or unusual Ada compilers still to be found too, notably: Ada for the Intel iAPX-432 (arguably an instruction set architecture tailored to Ada) Symbolics Ada - an Ada implemented in Lisp Ada for the inmos Transputer - an Ada for a parallel computer architecture ------ nickpsecurity I'm one of those people that think LISP is the most powerful language ever designed. Best for exploratory programming. Ada is best for mission-critical stuff being among the safest. While LISP didn't mainstream, Python did by emulating the right aspects of LISP without its issues. Coverity reported it had an extremely low defect rate, too. It's also great for maintainable, fairly-reliable, productive code. Yet, most installs still depend on unsafe code in interpreter and libraries. So, what do you people think about doing a Python implementation in a combo of Ada and SPARK? Everything is done using robust, structured programming style with Design by Contract and all checks enabled by default. A given set of checks can be disabled if SPARK or another tool proves absence of that problem. Ada's tasking or (even better) the SCOOP model can give it real concurrency. The standard library features can be as safe or fast as necessary with Ada-grade interface protections and typing. OS-specific details will be abstracted away in order to port it to a low-TCB, microkernel OS or MirageOS- style Xen guest in the future. The result should be as usable as Python, work about as fast, be more maintainable, and have fewer implementation risks. I'd also probably implement one of the Python compilers in Ada for performance boosts. Anyone think this is a project worth pushing on academics or FOSS? ------ hyperpape On page 4, I don't exactly follow how the problematic compilation model works (specifically the bit about the implementation approach). Can anyone explain what exactly it's saying? ~~~ alricb [http://archive.adaic.com/standards/83lrm/html/lrm-10-04.html...](http://archive.adaic.com/standards/83lrm/html/lrm-10-04.html#10.4) "Compilers are required to enforce the language rules in the same manner for a program consisting of several compilation units (and subunits) as for a program submitted as a single compilation. Consequently, a library file containing information on the compilation units of the program library must be maintained by the compiler or compiling environment." See also: [http://docs.adacore.com/gnat_ugn- docs/html/gnat_ugn/gnat_ugn...](http://docs.adacore.com/gnat_ugn- docs/html/gnat_ugn/gnat_ugn/the_gnat_compilation_model.html#gnat-and-other- compilation-models) ------ FractalNerve How can i learn Ada as a student, when the compiler and IDE tooling is still so expensive? I want to learn it. Seems impossible without joining the army or similar 😠 ~~~ plumeria Hey, take a look at [http://university.adacore.com/](http://university.adacore.com/) and [http://www.academia.edu/2490736/Integrating_8-bit_AVR_Micro-...](http://www.academia.edu/2490736/Integrating_8-bit_AVR_Micro- Controllers_in_Ada) ~~~ FractalNerve Thank you very much! ------ gizi I disagree with many things he writes. For example, safety in a language has never and will never come from particular language constructs. In the best case, we can isolate particular pieces of the program and look for counterexamples that will demonstrate that it does not work. That is why we use unit tests where applicable (where functions are at least idempotent). His concept of language safety is therefore spurious. There is simply no reason whatsoever to believe that a program in Ada would be safer than a program written in any other language. Safety is about validation and a program or a language cannot validate itself. Furthermore, a programming language is something with a _strong personality_ attached to it. Someone created it, because he felt like doing so and then you have other people who like it and feel like using it. Ada's language design committee did not qualify for that scenario. By the way, could you imagine someone passionate about revolutionizing the world with his new idea that will defeat Facebook or so, writing his passionate ideas in Ada? Seriously, nobody got the slightest enthusiastic about Ada and that is why Ada barely has any users at all. The language simply does not reflect what any user group would want to do. In other words, Ada has always been a solution desperately looking for a problem. ~~~ RogerL Ada has plenty of constructs to enhance safety. Explicit type conversion. Limited use of pointers. Arrays with bounds checking. No willy nilly 'enums are ints' type stuff. Contracts. Many more are covered here: [http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe- secur...](http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe-secure/) Plenty of people got interested in Ada. They are people that do things like write software for trains, nuclear reactors, medical devices, and aircraft. There's not much point in trying to use Ada for a website. With that said, I always felt that the pitch for safety was always overstated. Of course tests are needed (not aware of any mission critical system where they aren't heavily used). There were lots of papers slamming things like C++ vs Ada back in the day. Yet we were able to do safe things in both languages. Guaranteeing things in C++ was harder, but then other stuff was easier. I left Ada when I was trying to do some research in generic programming and Ada refused to let me do things that C++ would because it was 'unsafe'. Sure, unfettered use of generics would be unsafe, but so is rewriting the same code 10 times for different types. This was back when Stepanov published his STL paper. His ideas were great, they helped me, and I didn't look back. Still, if I was to work on another flight computer or weapons system I would not look askance on Ada. The tasking model in particular is very nice. I never understood the 'committee' argument. If you don't like something about a language, say what you don't like, don't talk about how it was created. Ada is very well designed, it is consistent, and it hangs together far more than most languages out there. No, no one is going to use Ada to 'move fast and break things' (defeat Facebook). It's a language for measured development of things that you can't afford to have break. Not spending weeks chasing pointer bugs, and going home to your family at the end of an 8 hour day is pretty darn exciting to some of us.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Historical Computers in Japan - mmoez http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/index.html ====== ArtWomb Amazing historical resource. Interesting how intimately the evolution of Supercomputing was tied to Japan's Aerospace Lab, precursor to JAXA. We often think of automobiles, not airplanes, when we think of Japanese industrial heavys. But virtually half of all aerospace components are supplied by the Japanese! 【National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan】 Numerical Wind Tunnel [http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/super/0020.html](http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/super/0020.html) ------ forinti The Fujitsu FM computers have impressive specs for 8 bit computers. They should have had as much success as the MSX had. [http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/personal/0007.html](http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/personal/0007.html) ~~~ ddingus Another 6809 8 bitter! Nice to read about, and yes. Agreed. ------ veysel-im Web page is not responsive ~~~ gsaga Same	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Startups in Myanmar - wyclif http://www.economist.com/news/business/21647318-startup-culture-germinates-unlikely-place-land-temples-and-tech ====== rmm As someone who is in the mining (ore not data) industry, the changes I have seen in Myanmar in the past 2-3 years is remarkable. I have been over with a variety of mining exploration companies, and with each trip there are major advances in overall 'economic' freedom. The effect of 'western' mining companies is already funneling through (much stricter environmental and safety controls). Look forward to watching it grow. ~~~ afarrell I'd be interested in hearing more about what you mean? Are you saying that there is simultaneously more economic freedom and more regulation? I'd believe it but I'm curious to see a more detailed picture of what that looks like. ~~~ yla92 There definitely are development in technology area. There are now more "start ups" than 3 years ago. But the thing is the infrastructure is pretty much broken still. The Internet is (still) slow and expensive. (A year ago, I spent the whole morning by trying to 'bundle install' and then the other half of day, the electricity is gone). So, basically, small companies are struggling to roll out their own products and from months to months, they have to make their cashflow by doing services/outsource. Also there are foreign tech companies (eg Rocket Internet) who are trying to clone their existing stuffs into the Myanmar and trying to make it work. I can say they are struggling either because our culture is different. What works in Singapore/Vietnam might not work in Myanmar. Recently, a friend of mine company tried to get some seed funding from outside for his startup and he had to set up a lot of extra work such as opening the same name company in Singapore, get the money for the Singapore company and then bring it back with him to Myanmar. Because there are still lots of restrictions around there. Feel free to ask me anything and I could try my best to answer them. Disclamer : I'm native Myanmar. Programmer working at a local small tech company. ------ dharma1 There are some really talented young people in Myanmar - would like to name Nex, Code2Lab, Total Gameplay Studio. Big open source movement too. It's an interesting time and our company, Myanmar Plus, is building apps for Android and web - things like [http://myanmarestate.net](http://myanmarestate.net) which is launching soon. You can reach me at info@myanmarplus.net - give us a shout if you're visiting or have questions! ------ EdwardDiego > Vagueness in the rules on foreign investment and intellectual-property > rights do not help with the difficult task of finding funding from abroad. Incorporating religious extremism into your law doesn't help either - a picture of Buddha wearing headphones on Facebook gets you jail time. [http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/268881/new- zealander-...](http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/268881/new-zealander- jailed-for-insulting-buddhism) ~~~ parennoob > a picture of Buddha wearing headphones on Facebook gets you jail time. In the West, wearing a shirt with a racy graphic design can cause a literal rocket scientist to be pilloried on social media to the point where he is literally crying on TV -- despite the fact that said shirt has nothing to do with his job. [1] Cultural differences, that's how they work. What is perfectly normal to you can appear extremely strict, weird, or ridiculous to others. [1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/11231320/Roset...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/11231320/Rosetta- mission-scientist-Dr-Matt-Taylor-cries-during-apology-over-offensive- shirt.html) ~~~ pjlegato 1) The rocket scientist case was a) entirely ridiculous in itself, and b) is a textbook example of the "tu quoque fallacy"[1]; the fact that some putatively similar thing happens in the west is irrelevant to the question of whether it is bad that it happens in Burma. 2) Do you realize that the postmodernist cultural relativism you are blithely spreading around the world was formulated by fascists to justify their wars of conquest and genocides? [2][3] 3) The mere fact that different cultures have differences in standards, and that what's normal in one place is weird in another, does not imply that one ought to be non-judgemental towards and non-critical of anything another culture does. This does not follow from the premise. Relativism additionally requires one to adopt an attitude of invarying quietism towards all manner of atrocities, no matter how severe (presuming that hypocrisy is undesirable, which does not seem to actually be a problem for many postmodernists.) The cultural relativist, faced with the Holocaust or the genocide in Sudan, can only passively say, "Well, that's their way, we shouldn't impose our own standards on them." This very cultural relativism argument is indeed routinely employed today by the most brutal dictatorships in the world[4] to justify all manner of atrocities, by brushing off any criticisms as mere "western imperialists trying to impose western standards upon us and our culture." That's the company you choose for yourself when you advocate for cultural relativism. In the western world, it's typically adopted as some kind of enlightened and fair worldview by kindhearted intellectuals in a liberal arts college somewhere. Outside the western world, it's something very different: an ideological tool for dictators to sidestep criticism of atrocity. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger) [3] "Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth … then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity... From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable." \- Benito Mussolini, "Diuturna" [4] President Bashir of Sudan, North Korea, the Burmese military junta itself, the PRC, and many others. ~~~ allendoerfer Your argumentation makes sense and I enjoyed reading it, unfortunately you just followed Godwin's law. Your parent comment could have just wanted to point out, that the western world is not perfect and we should be (as always) careful when judging. He or she could have found a better example, though, directly comparing religious legislation to religious legislation. Being reflective does not always equal cultural relativism. ~~~ harperlee Also, it is fallacious to suggest, that, because of the fact that it was initially formulated by fascists as a propagandistic weapon, postmodernist cultural relativism is false, or not a useful view of the world. If fact I think it is very useful to stop and consider that point of view, and be able to reflect on it, and reach conclusions about why it is or it is not a good cosmovision to have. ~~~ pjlegato If you reread my argument, you will see that I never said the fact that fascists invented moral relativism makes it false. I rather argued that those who adopt this viewpoint are aligning themselves not only with fascists but with all manner of other tyrants and dictators who commit what most people regard as horrid atrocities, and that moreover moral relativists are _required_ (insofar as they wish to avoid hypocrisy) to morally and philosophically support these acts. I believe that most western moral relativists do not realize this. I am pointing out that moral relativism is not an inherently leftist or "nice" viewpoint, contrary to common opinion among western intellectuals. I said nothing about whether it was true or false.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What are the most challenging problems in the world today? - jayamohan What are the biggest problems of our society today?<p>Insofar as mathematics or natural sciences are concerned, one can easily identify unsolved problems. But, what about social sciences and our daily life? The answers may remain rather subjective and/or elusive. Below I have given a set of problems that look serious to me personally in the order that the problems that are vague and least certain which could also be solved in the near future in the bottom (5) to the obvious and most certain or whose solution(s) is unknown as yet on top (1) in the list.<p>5. Knowledge Management: Every society advances through sharing and 'proper use' of the knowledge it gained from experiences. (For example, Using nano-robots to construct machines and buildings would be a proper use, but using them as a weapon of mass destruction is an improper use of knowledge.) We have sufficient knowledge (or accumulating knowledge sufficient to meet the problem) of how to eradicate diseases, eliminate poverty, avoid natural disasters etc; but, how effectively are we applying those to the real world? Very poorly. It is probably a cliche that saying "education is the silver bullet". True, we all know that. But the problem is not only with people being unable to get education, it is with system of how eduction is provided that needs a radical upgrading.<p>4. Inequalities: By inequalites, I mean all inequalities of such nature as power, economic/income, technological, and resources. Crimes and wars are the most pampered children of inequalities - a fleeting glance in history will prove this. People have almost always fought for resources; one can look back in any age in the written history and one will find a story of a higher power invading an inferior one, there is always one big guy who is running the show and everyone else plays the passive role. This deprives people of freedom and thus prevents the creation of value. Too much power and capabilities unevenly and unfairly distributed in too few people naturally engenders trouble. An emerging multi-polar, cooperative world could possibly be a solution.<p>3. Lack of Cultural Competence & Tolerance: Arms Race, Terrorism, Discriminations and the like have their origins in cultural misunderstandings for the most part. The spreading of organized religions and other types of propaganda is the major contributor to almost all violence, unrest and ignorance in the world. Tolerance is not only of importance in sustaining peace, but a necessity from an evolutionary stand point as well. We cannot expect highly bureaucratic governments of all nations to take the necessary steps towards the goal of achieving a unviersal brotherhood, but cultivating a cosmopolitan culture will enable this.<p>2. Energy, Degradation of Environment & Natural Resources, and Climate Change: One cannot overstate the importance of wise use of resources. Things such as energy, water and land are finite, but most people, particularly in the developed world, behave as though they weren't and price is paid by everyone. Negative externalities resulted by careless and selfish use of resources are extremely hazardous and irreversible,and furthermore cause countless unforeseen and unintended consequences due to the infinite chaos in the world. Anyone can figure out what possible solution there is to this problem, so no need reiterating.<p>1. Overpopulation: World Population is soon to hit 7 billion. The reason overpopulation is the top problem is that it aggravates every other problem in this list.<p>Solutions: The solutions indicated in the last sentences of problems assumes a normative view of the world, unfortunately that is not the state of the matters at the moment. But I, being an optimist believe we together can make differences. Extraordinary persons are always from ordinary people, not from elites. Although these goals are far-fetched in a short-term they are certainly attainable in the medium-to-long term that is within the next 25 or so years if only we act collectively and cooperatively. Looking forward to your comments. ====== ErrantX I think your generalising a lot of issues. Like inequality is a huge field all in itself - some of them major issues, some of them becoming less so. If overpopulation is the prime factor the solution is, rationally, easy. Expand outwards into the solar system/space. (assuming we are talking long term solutions). ~~~ jayamohan Yes, generalising to the point that we see the very root all classes of problems. Inequality for example is vague and poorly defined as I said in beginning. Overpopulation is deceiving and looks very silly at the first glance but as deal with more data, it turns out to be a giant. Expanding to outer space is easily said than done even if we are talking long term, of course we can, if we last long enough without problems but one is ignoring so many minute details in such assumption. But I too hope for best, Companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic are already on ambitious projects. We must wait and see what will prove to be the optimal solution.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What landing page do you love? - richardreeze I saw this question today on Indie Hackers and thought it would be interesting to ask the HN community.<p>For me, the answer would be Stripe Atlas (https://stripe.com/atlas) ====== theclaw [https://www.lingscars.com/](https://www.lingscars.com/) \- yes, this is a real car rental business. Best viewed on desktop - the mobile version is not nearly as... potent. ~~~ drenvuk People should check out the page source too. ~~~ bilegeek I think this is worse: [http://arngren.net/](http://arngren.net/) ------ kapilkale [https://muzzleapp.com/](https://muzzleapp.com/) ~~~ mthoms This is from the same developer as CodeKit. His documentation, sales copy and release notes are always _hilarious_. Check out the "reviews" on [http://codekitapp.com](http://codekitapp.com) , Especially this gem: >Your app is lame, your face is lame, your friends are lame, and your continued existence deeply offends us. >Hacker News, Where Self-Esteem Goes To Die :-) ~~~ nojvek The contrast on that side is super low. I’m viewing with grayscale inverted in low light (at night) and the site is totally unreadable. Wouldn’t call it a great landing page. ------ bradchoate [https://panic.com](https://panic.com) is pretty great and so is the landing page for their upcoming hardware product: [https://play.date](https://play.date) ~~~ huhtenberg Playdate site is awful. It appears to be designed for people sitting 2 meters away from their 8K screens. ~~~ kjs3 Not only do I completely agree, the original 'panic.com' site is generic looking and usability annoying. "We do generic icons for a living...you have to hover over them to get any info". Really? I'm assuming huhtenberg works there. ~~~ huhtenberg You probably meant that the GP worked there, not me. ~~~ kjs3 MY bad. Sorry for the misattribution. ------ thunderbong [https://fibery.io/anxiety](https://fibery.io/anxiety) ~~~ goblin89 Maybe that’s a joke, but this page appears to have managed to crash Safari on iOS a couple seconds after loading. ~~~ throwGuardian When it comes to Safari, given their widely known non-compliance with W3C standards, I'd wager this to be a bug/non-compliance within Safari. ~~~ goblin89 Agreed, that‘s a possibility. Although a properly tested landing page probably shouldn’t crash a relatively mainstream browser on current version regardless of its quirks (technical correctness isn’t everything), this wouldn’t be an excuse for the quirks nor would it be a reason to not love the landing page for other reasons. ~~~ throwGuardian On the contrary, I believe developers should stand up to Apple where they can, and the browser is likely the only place for it, given they have zero leverage in negotiations on native apps, in which Apple is making life very very hard for developers who simply do not fall in line with their guidance. If Apple will willy-nilly reject app store (both Mac and iOS) apps, retroactively change rules to kill competition (look up what they did with steam) and randomly start banning popular frameworks (electron apps are the latest victim), and still insist on being W3C non-compliant, in a blatant effort to force users and developers to their walled garden, developers need to grow a backbone and take Apple on where they can. If Mac users really want your webapp, Firefox/Opera.... are just an install away ~~~ goblin89 Rereading ancestor comments I think we are on the same page actually, but in case I’m wrong… In general, I could appreciate the decision to make a stance in this way on a personal level, but when evaluating a real landing page for a paid product from business perspective—which would be an inseparable aspect—I would not be able to recommend preferring “technically correct” over “actually working”. This does not only hurt sales/business, but also causes stress to non- technical end users. All they experience is their browser exiting when they visit the page (thankfully, tabs are preserved on next launch); they are not concerned with implementation and do not become more aware of Apple’s standard non-conformance as a result. A non-commercial website oriented towards developers, or indeed a joke such as in this case, is fine, of course. In short, violating open standards—bad, taking a stance—good, hurting regular users and business—bad. ------ Finnucane >For me, the answer would be Stripe Atlas ([https://stripe.com/atlas](https://stripe.com/atlas)) Why? It seems very generic and bland. Or is that the point? Also, it make you scroll through a lot of stuff to find what you are presumably going to the site to find. They bury the important stuff way down at the bottom. Yeah, most 'landing pages' are pretty useless exercises in annoying your user. ~~~ richardreeze I believe it gives you all the "big picture" information you need in a very simple way (maybe that's why you call it bland). But I do find simplicity important. This is hard to do with a product as complex as Stripe Atlas (just Google "form a company" and click around to see what I mean). But they pulled it off. And it looks beautiful. TLDR: I love a landing page that turns complexity into simplicity. ~~~ JohnFen Maybe my brain is broken, but I found it uninformative on the surface, and it makes it hard to locate any actual information about the project. ------ lodi "Just tell me what the damn thing does." [http://www.tarsnap.com/](http://www.tarsnap.com/) (I'm also a happy user!) ~~~ JohnFen Now, _that 's_ a good landing page. ------ ColinWright None. Absolutely none. I have _never_ "loved" a landing page. They are always too clever, too designed, too cluttered, too austere, too "gorgeous", too self-indulgent, too self-important, _etc._ ~~~ spiderfarmer Is there anything you do like? ~~~ ColinWright Yes. I like a landing page whose implementation makes it clear that the people behind it have thought long and hard about the people who will visit, and what they want. I like a page that's clean, clear, spare, easy to find the things people are looking for when they come to a landing page. The XKCD panel nails it: [https://www.xkcd.com/773/](https://www.xkcd.com/773/) There are _so_ many things I really don't care about when I land on your site, and a few things I really do care about. Visit the web site for a museum to find out how much it costs to visit[0]: > Plan your day > Your visit > Discover > Become a friend > Memberships > Admissions > Audio guides > Day tickets > $18 Then you want opening times and which holidays they are closed, and the page is comprehensive and detailed, and from 2008 and clearly wrong. Absolutely no thought about what a visitor is trying to accomplish, and instead is all about trying to ... well, I don't know what they're trying to do. I like a landing page that has clearly catered for the visitor, and not just to show off how wonderful their web design skills are. \-------- [0] Adapted from here: [https://twitter.com/sophie_gadd/status/1213126700625739778](https://twitter.com/sophie_gadd/status/1213126700625739778) ------ rimliu The only true and lasting love: [https://www.berkshirehathaway.com](https://www.berkshirehathaway.com) ~~~ solarkraft I find it pretty hilarious that a substantial part of it is an ad for Geico. ~~~ nojvek Well. BH owns Geico or prolly the largest shareholder. Also one of their most lucrative investments. I personally dislike Geico’s spammy marketing but I guess it’s minting billions for BH. If it were to me, they’d be a law that all insurance companies need to be a co-op or non profit. Profit in insurance (esp for health insurance) makes no sense for a country. ------ criddell If you have a browser that has flash, then [http://www.zombo.com](http://www.zombo.com) is a good one. ~~~ dschuessler Otherwise you can visit: [https://html5zombo.com/](https://html5zombo.com/) ------ kamranahmedse Looking at my "Designs" bookmarks folder, half of the websites have been shutdown and the other half I don't "love" any more. This proves two things for me, design has nothing to do with the success of a product, and the second: design is subjective and changes not only from person to person but also for you, there is an absolute chance that one design that you love now, may hate in future. ~~~ psychstudio I have to agree. I agonised over the design of our landing page but eventually came to the same conclusion. Plain text that gets as many selling points into the eyes of the visitor above the fold is what I believe is the most sensible route if you're debating bit to design your landing page. ~~~ jjeaff I think clean and attractive is key. At least for me. If you have a product I want and your landing page is well designed and clearly explains the product, then I am much more likely to try your product. I assume, right or wrong, that if you out that much work into your landing page, you must have put the same into your product. Now if your product stinks after trying it, I'll leave just as fast. But at least I have it a try. I'm sure I'm not unique in that regard. Now, if you are resource constrained, focus on the product first, of course. ------ tnolet Notion is great [https://notion.so](https://notion.so). Will probably rip it off for my company soon. ~~~ sumnole Not just a great landing page but a great product, which helps. ~~~ nojvek Wouldn’t call notion a great product. I found it incredibly hard to use. ------ eat_veggies Stack Overflow actually has a landing page! Usually your entry point is via a Google search, so you never see it. [https://stackoverflow.com/](https://stackoverflow.com/) ~~~ noer That's a homepage though, I'd argue that questions pages are more like landing pages for SO. ------ dewey This thread comes up once every month, I'd suggest to go over the past month's threads: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=landing%20page&sort=byPopularity&type=story) ------ khaledh I loved how plain and to the point Magic's original landing page (2015) was: [https://web.archive.org/web/20150313215658/https://getmagicn...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150313215658/https://getmagicnow.com/) Now it's been redesigned of course: [https://getmagic.com/](https://getmagic.com/) But I still prefer the original. ~~~ richardreeze I remember this! You're right I also loved the original landing page when I first saw it. Thanks for sharing. ------ phs318u about:blank ------ open-source-ux If you're looking for landing page inspiration, here are two sites that collect examples [https://onepagelove.com/](https://onepagelove.com/) [https://www.pages.xyz/](https://www.pages.xyz/) ~~~ whoisjuan Shameless plug: [https://www.waveguide.io/landing- pages/all](https://www.waveguide.io/landing-pages/all) and for Mobile Landing Pages: [https://www.waveguide.io/mobile-landing- pages/all](https://www.waveguide.io/mobile-landing-pages/all) ------ tkainrad I refurbished the landing page of my personal blog site during the Christmas holidays and have received some very nice feedback: [https://tkainrad.dev/](https://tkainrad.dev/) ~~~ nojvek Oh well. There is a cookie notice that takes more than 50% of screen real estate when I load the page. ~~~ tkainrad Oh, wasn't really aware that it would be so large in some cases. Thank you for this feedback. Could you tell me which kind of device you were using, I guess a relatively small mobile phone? ~~~ nojvek iPhone8 iOS. Pretty average mobile device. ~~~ tkainrad Alright, will make some changes, i.e. not showing it to non-EU visitors and making it a little smaller. Thanks! ------ soneca I struggled to answer that question myself while researching for my own product's landing page. I decided to go for a very different path and create something that could showcase the product as soon as possible, with simple and objective copy for people who wanted to understand it better. I do very much love it as it is right now, but of course I am biased, and of course I am open to criticism to improve it. But the principle (clear copy + showcase the product working) I will probably keep. Here it is to receive your judgement: [https://www.quidsentio.com](https://www.quidsentio.com) ~~~ pryelluw Copywriter here: Use a more common font. Headlines over buttons. ------ ryantgtg This is one I made [https://pinballmap.com/](https://pinballmap.com/) I like it, but I think it would be nicer without the big list of "regional maps" at the bottom. I'm not really sure how best to include that list (users have told us, "list all the regions so I can ctrl-F for them! or else I hate you!" Next I want to add some stats to the landing page. Like, top 25 pinball machines that are on location. And each one listed would be a link to show that machine on the map. ~~~ DrScump Very grateful for your work. Have you considered having the map be optional (a click away)? To preserve mobile data if nothing else. Also, given how often turnover happens, a link next to each itemized machine to notify you of changes (and perhaps another to notify participating owners of mechanical problems)? I wish the 49ers playoff and INDISC weren't the same weekend. ~~~ ryantgtg Well, the main, searchable map is one click away ("Explore the Map"). But yeah, that map on the landing page that only shows where the regions are, we could simply hide that on mobile. We are really de-emphasizing the regions in exchange for the single map where you can search anywhere. I don't like the search experience on that single map, though. But it'll take some work to redo it. I want it to be more like the app search experience. If an operator is tagged at a location, and that operator has granted us permission to notify them, then they get a daily email of any comments left on their machines. Roughly half of them take advantage of this (147 out of 299). We should probably remind operators of this feature more often, given that it's now buried in a 6 year old blog post. My daughter's birthday is on the same weekend as INDISC! I used to like going to that tourney. ------ werber Honestly, here. I want content instantly ------ winrid Self plug - TRYING to finish [https://fastcomments.com](https://fastcomments.com). Goal for the homepage was something pleasing and simple. ~~~ TehBrian Loaded fast, that's a thumbs up from me! Most of the landing pages I've seen on this thread have been very pretty, no doubt, but on my poor little computer they weren't the speediest of websites. Clicked on the website you linked, bam, it's loaded. It's also very simple too! No distracting shapes or clunky animations, it's just a very satisfying website. +1 ~~~ winrid You don't know how happy that makes me, thanks. I'm tired of slow software so I vowed to make all my personal projects perform well. Along the way I wanted to add comments to my blog, tried disqus, and figured I could do one better (at least for me). ------ masonic Craigslist. Easily navigated by topic _and_ by geography. ------ zeroego [https://www.kickscondor.com/](https://www.kickscondor.com/) Can't believe no one has posted this yet. ------ nottorp Well, you tell me landing page, I think marketing lies. And stupid responsive design pages that waste 99.95% of the space on my monitor. How can I love something like that? ------ BlameKaneda I like the minimalism of Bonsai: ([https://www.hellobonsai.com/](https://www.hellobonsai.com/) ------ Confiks [https://burnout.so](https://burnout.so) is awesome. Fantastic product too; I'm living it. ~~~ richardreeze This is actually a great landing page! Makes me want to try the product ~~~ JohnFen I've seen worse, but in my opinion, this is not a good landing page. It doesn't offer much in terms of actual, actionable information -- only marketing-speak broadsides, the layout is hard to follow, if you change the font size to make it more usable (the size the page uses is far too large), then the layout breaks further, and so on. ------ adrianmsmith [https://www.jooq.org/](https://www.jooq.org/) \- Fast to load \- Tells you what the product does right at the top \- As it's a database library, and there are many other database libraries - the features are written in terms of how the product is different from the competition - goes into \- Code examples pretty soon, so you can really see what using it would be like. ------ darasan The new site from The Designer’s Republic is really cool: [https://www.thedesignersrepublic.com/](https://www.thedesignersrepublic.com/) Love the colors and use of simple animation - really stands out from the bland tech/startup sites we usually see. Check out the Wipeout icons and typography :-) ~~~ some1else Love their work, but the new website sucks. Let me look at things on my own time. But I guess a person who's tired of being worshipped for things they did twenty years ago would prefer you don't pore over them. ------ kp98 Pitch.com It is a start up to compete with powerpoint that raised 50 million pre-mvp... yea ... sweet landing page tho ~~~ richardreeze Geez... Love the landing page though it feels like a Pixar movie. ------ JohnFen I can honestly say that I've never seen a landing page that I loved. Landing pages are those things that get in the way of what I'm really trying to find. ------ pcarolan [https://www.blackbox.cool/](https://www.blackbox.cool/) Is so fun and tells you everything you need to know. ------ snicker7 [https://python-poetry.org/](https://python-poetry.org/) I think the snake animation is pretty cool. ------ jojo_kelly [https://thriva.co/](https://thriva.co/) \- I love the layout on this one! ~~~ cia-killer It looks so much better on large screens without the margin ------ vinrob92 Lots of them on [https://www.land-book.com](https://www.land-book.com) are great. ------ dzink [https://www.dreamlist.com](https://www.dreamlist.com) ------ sys_64738 [https://search.yahoo.com](https://search.yahoo.com) ------ pythonist [https://newreleases.io](https://newreleases.io) ------ adamonkey [http://3kvc.com/](http://3kvc.com/) ~~~ nojvek So much slow animation. ------ aksss Https://Drudgereport.com - still king of highly efficient info delivery. ------ teddyh xkcd was right about web sites in 2010 ([https://www.xkcd.com/773/](https://www.xkcd.com/773/)) and it hasn’t really gotten better since then, either. ------ jacob_rezi [https://rezi.io](https://rezi.io) ~~~ apazzolini The page is blank in Firefox until you've scrolled down. ~~~ solarkraft Not on mobile, but it did take a good 10-20 seconds to load. ~~~ jacob_rezi noted thank you ------ egypturnash I love the one on my own website. [http://egypt.urnash.com](http://egypt.urnash.com) I haven't changed it since I made it back in 2011, aside from adding links to new projects. ------ memn0nis I really like stripe ------ toberej privacy.com for sure, super simple and clear. ------ Indiehacker2 podia.com ------ baxtr I think landing pages are overrated. I like good products no matter how they are presented... ~~~ lnalx However you can have the best product in the world, if you can't sell or market it (via a landing page for example), it will never be used (or very little). ------ Swizec I’m partial to [https://reactfordataviz.com](https://reactfordataviz.com) because it’s the best one I ever made and reaches 7th on Google for important keywords even tho it’s a sales page. I like it because it loads fast, isn’t very designed, and focuses on decent copywriting instead of A/B testing quackery And it converts well at an average of 50 cents per pageview. Took about 4 years of customer research and conversations to arrive at that copy. ~~~ solarkraft > Took about 4 years of customer research and conversations to arrive at that > copy. And nobody caught the "havign"? ~~~ limbicsystem And 'andn' and 'youll'. But still pretty cool...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Dear ICO, Sue Us - colinscape http://nocookielaw.com/ ====== gavinlynch Every time I hear this cookie debate, I feel I must be missing something. If you don't want to be tracked. TURN. COOKIES. OFF. There is a reason all web browsers come with per-domain cookies policies. We don't need a cookie law. We need some common sense. Everyone is looking to make this someone else's responsibility. Guess what: Your digital security and privacy is _your_ responsibility. I hate this entire debate because: 1) Cookies serve a very, very valuable purpose in website development. Client- side storage is used in basically every major website on the internet. 2) This is hardly low-hanging fruit, and we have much, much bigger problems. 3) Who is the arbiter of what "allowed use" cookies are? We're going to have someone who actually decides, for individual websites, whether cookie use is proper or not? Is it going to work like a DMCA take-down request? An individual sends a request to review a website's cookie policies, and that IT department will have to submit a technical analysis and provide reasons for their cookie usage when a user feels their rights have been violated? 4) You know where this is going? Every single website that you register on is just going to give you a EULA-type agreement when you create an account. New to Facebook? Enter your username, click this checkbox that says "I accept your terms", and that's it. Normal users will just roll with basically any terms you present to them. Making this entirely ineffective except for the small minority of people, like many here, who are hyper vigilante about digital privacy. For the people this is meant to protect, they will likely never even think about it and opt-in anyway. 5) I completely reject the notion of getting politicians to dictate requirements to the tech industry in terms of how to handle the web stack. Let the politicians get back to blaming each other for X failures and make Y promises to the public, and get out of my internet. ~~~ rickmb I nearly stopped reading after the second sentence, and I definitely stopped after your first "argument". I don't want to be stalked, period. Not turning cookies off should not mean I immediately relinquish my rights, just like I don't relinquish my right to privacy by stepping into the street. Yes, cookies server a very valuable purpose in website development, and guest what: _for those purposes the so-called cookie law (which btw covers all forms of tracking, calling it the "cookie law" is sheer propaganda in itself) doesn't affect any website in any fucking way_. This underhanded tactic of spreading deliberate misinformation in order to justify the massive violation of privacy caused by commercialized stalking disgusts me. It's like the mafia bitching about how it's so unfair and stupid that politicians have made racketeering illegal. ~~~ gavinlynch Okay, thanks for stating flat out, right away, that you didn't take the time to understand my points or have an intelligent discussion. That way, I can disregard your post too. I stopped reading after you told me you stopped reading my post. Have a nice day. ------ eckyptang I think the general attitude here is pretty bad and I'm disgusted with the replies. I hope the hell they do get sued. The reason that the law exists is that people have abused the cookie functionality terribly to track people all over the Internet using every possible loophole that they can. Now the price is being paid through not very good legislation. You wrote functionality that tracks people and now you're whinging when people are given their privacy back? Forget it - I have no sympathy. Regarding legitimate use, you click accept and the problem goes away. With respect to analytics, stop being cheap and lazy and do it from your logs. ~~~ oliveremberton I'm the founder of Silktide and they guy who wrote that page. Whilst I appreciate the law exists for a good reason, that doesn't mean the law is good. In it's current form it simply doesn't help user privacy or website owners. I'm hardly alone in saying as much. We ourselves wrote no "functionality that tracks people" - our site merely uses Google Analytics (anonymous measurement of visitors) and social plugins like Disqus, the Tweet and Like buttons. By the letter of the law those have to be concealed until a user has manually opted in to display them. In practice everyone instead started showing slide-down banners which accomplish nothing for privacy but piss off users. Anyone who uses analytics properly knows there's no equivalent log-based solution. Understanding the path users take through a site, how long they view pages for, whether they buy when they came from one advert versus another - these are common practice for good reason and they have ABSOLUTELY ZERO implication for user's privacy, as all this data is anonymous. The relatively few websites which genuinely might be jeopardising user's privacy - Facebook, Google, Amazon etc - tend to be large, ubiquitous and mostly ad networks. The average 10 page company website is not technically sophisticated enough to subvert a user's privacy nor do they have the visitors to do so. My fight is with a stupid law, not with privacy. ~~~ eckyptang I agree the law is bad. I actually stated that the legislation is not very good. However, suing people is probably the best approach bar forcing Firefox, Chrome and IE to ship Ghostery (then what are you going to do?) I mean you're obviously annoyed, aware and scared of the consequences. However, the fact that you plug oddles of stuff into your web site that intentionally tracks people and hide under the banner of "we merely use" is the sort of attitude we don't want and the sort that should get you sued. Ignorance and laziness is not an excuse. I don't want to be tracked by Google Analytics and for my usage to be profiled and tracked across different sites (this almost certainly does happen as GA is capable of reading enough info from the browser to identify a user or at least build a persistent profile). Google do not have to operate under EU privacy laws as they aren't EU based. Disqus, Twitter, Facebook all track users through these buttons just by them simply being there. None of these have to operate under EU privacy laws as they aren't EU based. Your buttons and analytics MUST be disabled until someone agrees because you operate under EU privacy laws. That's your problem. Either put the banner up or get rid of all the junk that you've plugged into your web site. Regarding analytics, it sounds like analytics has grown to encompass too much of your business model. Have you thought that perhaps you are possibly not entited to the information that you gather? As for advertising - if your revenue is derived from that, good luck. You're going to die miserably. Find a better model. Build something you can sell rather than something you can scatter with crap to pay your bills. Sorry don't I don't buy your argument. It seems naive and arrogant. Users first, or to hell with the WWW. ~~~ sageikosa Suing websites is going to force browser makers to do something? Perhaps that chain of reasoning can be expanded upon... Fighting urge to flame the revolutionary baiting in this post, such as use of _we don't want_ in paragraph 2, and _possibly not entitled_ in paragraph 8. I usually don't like deconstructing posts, but the tone rubbed me the wrong way for an intellectual discussion. All that laws designed to limit technology do is limit technology. ~~~ eckyptang I think I covered that here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4479140> ~~~ sageikosa So...the lawsuits will drive a demand (from site owners, presumably) for legislation to force browser makers to do something...? ~~~ eckyptang Not really. It's more that browser vendors are worried that it'll shoot their market share so they won't turn this on by default. If users get used to it, that is likely to be less of an issue. ~~~ 18pfsmt You know, I'm the type of person that operates as you would like most people to (i.e. NoScript, Adblock, RequestPolicy, BetterPrivacy, etc.), and by reading your comments you've made me realize how I've been kind of a jerk for installing these things on friends' machines. They get annoyed and call me asking what I did to their machines (and how to "fix" it). Obviously, I should've explained the use of and showed them how to use these add-ons, but such things are difficult to do in a casual/ social context. Many of the concepts are foreign, and there is a whole set of jargon that requires explanation in the first place. These are non-technical, yet educated, people in their 30s for whom most of this seems academic. So, I've just installed, and hoped they'd figure it out. I wish it were easy, but it's not; now, I'm certain I will no longer do this because I don't want them to "get used to it" for any reason other than that is what they choose to do. ~~~ eckyptang That's a great approach and I admire your honesty. I think users should always have a choice. At the moment, there is a big assumption made which is the problem. ------ TomGullen Popups/dropdowns etc semi-forced upon UK websites are extremely anti- competitive in my opinion. \- Visitors who the law is trying to protect (less savvy web users) could easily be scared by cookie messages \- It's another barrier to actually accessing content on the site \- It's time consuming and difficult to implement sometimes. For example, if your site requires cookies to function, what should it do if a visitor declines permission? These new laws seem to be addressing peoples irrational fears, and not the actual problem. I'd like to see them go down the pan. I hope next year when they start enforcing it they don't make examples of companies with cherry picked large fines. ~~~ stordoff > For example, if your site requires cookies to function, what should it do if > a visitor declines permission? If I'm reading the guidance[1] correctly (and I've only skimmed it), you don't need permission for essential cookies. Most sites just display a message along the lines of "We're using cookies; your continued use of this site gives consent" etc.. [1] [http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/privacy_and_electron...](http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/privacy_and_electronic_communications/the_guide/cookies.aspx) ------ 5h Utter props to silktide to pushing this, I feel like half my posts on HN have been about this retarded legislation. Those who misuse cookies will soon use even more insidious means, those who don't are being forced into implementing stupid confusing boilerplate, utterly ridiculous! ~~~ oliveremberton Thanks! (I'm the founder of Silktide and author of that rant). We had some constructive suggestions on what could be done instead, although these are definitely up for debate. The gist would be using a rel element like so: <a href='privacy.html' rel='privacypolicy'>Privacy</a> and then using that as a means of consistently linking to a privacy policy. As a result, policies would have consistent language for users ('look for the "Privacy" link') but could also be detected automatically by browsers or testing tools. That way you could actually test your site is properly linking to a policy, and users could have browser preferences like "disable cookies until I've seen a policy" or whatever. It's just an idea but we've implemented it on our sites and will be interested to see what others think: <http://blog.silktide.com/2012/09/fixing-a-broken-cookie-law/> ~~~ loceng Plus could then have a link to the privacy policy page added in the actual browser, rather than intruding on the user experience. ------ jamiecurle I'd like to see this legislation deleted and chalked up to a learning experience for government. In principal yes, I do want websites to be open about their cookie use, but leaving the implementation down to the website owners has spawned many different ways of dealing with the issue. This makes it less clear and likely more confusing for the end user. Let's try a solution at the user & browser level. ~~~ Isofarro "Let's try a solution at the user & browser level." That's not enough. Only the website really knows what the cookies are actually being used for. That information needs to be surfaced in a manner where customer preferences can be tailored. Trying to keep track of which cookie domains are used for cross-site tracking (which is what a user/browser level mechanism will max out to) becomes a big game of whack-a-mole. Cheap domains, endless supply of subdomains; IP address filtering can help, but there's a fair bit of collateral damage. We have P3P, but it's too much of an all-or-nothing thing. It's quite ardous for a website to implement correctly, and too easy to be unforthcoming with accurate information. But, we need to be able to understand the purpose of every cookie (and similar client-side storage mechanisms), and they need to be done in a way that tracking-related storage can be disabled without disrupting the storage related to the primary purpose of the site (from the customer's point of view). But the root cause of all this is that there are website owners who do not accept that their customers or visitors have a right to privacy. That perception needs to change for a viable solution to exist. It's a social issue, solving it in a technical manner runs into a similar set of issues that a legislative approach is currently doing. ~~~ jamiecurle You're right, it is a whack-a-mole situation, which is why I'd move more towards a browser and user level solution. The OP made a fine suggestion that bridges responsibility between user, website owner and browser > The gist would be using a rel element like so: <a href='privacy.html' > rel='privacypolicy'>Privacy</a> and then using that as a means of > consistently linking to a privacy policy. As a result, policies would have > consistent language for users ('look for the "Privacy" link') but could also > be detected automatically by browsers or testing tools. That way you could > actually test your site is properly linking to a policy, and users could > have browser preferences like "disable cookies until I've seen a policy" or > whatever. [edited for clarity] ------ grabeh I think the ICO has acknowledged the issues with the law and as a result is taking a gentle approach to enforcing the law (which the OP's crusade seems at odds with...). I think it's a good idea to attempt to increase user awareness of how information about a person's visit to a site will be used. As the guidance acknowledges, the type of most interest are third party advertising cookies and if the law helps to increase awareness of such usage, then it will have succeeded. In terms of geographical location, my understanding is that the location of the provider is irrelevant as if they are providing a service in the EU, they should be complying with the law. ------ bbguitar Having spent a good chunk of time implementing cookie permission popups across our sites, Google Analytics showed a drop down to 10% of the normal traffic. (The traffic is a bit higher according to the logs, but not normal. Also as someone else pointed out the funnelling and reporting is harder to decipher) Putting in an implied statement and removing the pop-up and we're back to the regular levels. Sorry but this law is flawed and I'm glad its getting a bit of airing again. Come on ICO and the EU peeps who created this directive please rethink this with some expert advice. ------ asg Good to see them taking a stance. It is a great shame that this law does absolutely nothing to improve privacy. I typically do my casual browsing in incognito mode, which means that I'm constantly bombarded with these cookie warnings. So this law has significantly reduced the quality of my experience, for no benefit at all. The people who want to track me still continue to do so. ------ r4vik interim solution, add this to your adblock plus rules: <https://github.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-shit-list> and send me patches when you find a site with a cookie warning ~~~ mike-cardwell Nice! Up until now I've been writing small GreaseMonkey plugins to handle this. Added your list. Expect the occasional pull request. :) [edit] First pull request sent. ~~~ r4vik first pull request merged. look forward to many more :) ------ MattBearman Can anyone who is more law savvy than I answer this question for me: Does a European company have to put the cookie message on their site if the site is hosted in the US? ~~~ MattBearman Found a (sort of) answer in their cookie_guidance_v3.pdf "An organisation based in the UK is likely to be subject to the requirements of the Regulations even if their website is technically hosted overseas. Organisations based outside of Europe with websites designed for the European market, or providing products or services to customers in Europe, should consider that their users in the UK and Europe will clearly expect information and choices about cookies to be provided." Of course, much like the rest of this legislation, the phrase "likely to be subject to" is vague and ill defined. Sometimes I hate being base in England. ------ jpswade I remember Silktide from ~2004 when they used to have SiteScore. [http://web.archive.org/web/20041010040340/http://sitescore.s...](http://web.archive.org/web/20041010040340/http://sitescore.silktide.com/) Nice to see they're still around. ------ Zirro In Sweden, just about every non-government site has ignored this law. I don't think we'll see anyone getting sued over it any time soon here. ------ jvvlimme If instead of using cookies we would swap to using the browsers storage, wouldn't we circumvent this entire rubbish law (+ the other advantages it already provides)? <http://www.jstorage.info> ~~~ prisonblues The law states: "a person shall not store or gain access to information stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user unless the requirements of paragraph (2) are met." Paragraph 2 then sets out how consent needs to be obtained, and the test that the subscriber needs to have given their consent before information is stored on their computer. Cookies, flash cookies, HTML5 databases, etc. are all covered under the general concept of storing on a subscriber's computer. The original law is here - [http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2426/regulation/6/ma...](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2426/regulation/6/made) \- and here are the recent amendments - <http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2011/1208/made> ~~~ PJones Isn't this vague enough that a site with an image is infringing? "Sure, they requested the web site, but they never explicitly said they wanted the image, and now you've gone and stored it in their cache." ~~~ alter8 How do you read back the tracking information from a cached object, page or image without replacing it with a fresh new one?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: DebView, a platform for sane and constructive debates - martincastin http://debview.eu ====== martincastin Debates on social networks and on the net in general are often getting unconstructive and overwhelmed by trolls. That's too bad because the internet could be a great tool to bring people together to discuss important matters in our democracy. Moreover, the way algorithms work on the internet often brings people with similar opinions together, making it harder for them to understand how someone could have a different opinion (filter bubbles). DebView aims at bringing people from all possible horizons to talk together about various subjects. It's interface encourages users to summarize their arguments, enabling anyone to get a quick grasp of any debate. People votes show anyone what are the arguments mattering the most. The website is at the moment pretty basic, but the intention is to get as quickly as possible the feedback of users for further improvements.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Web Startups with a subscription based business model - psaccounts Are there any founders here who are building Web Startups with a business model to sell subscriptions (or at least a free+premium model and not an advertising driven business model)?<p>* How difficult was is to acquire paying customers? * What type of customers are these -- individuals or small organizations? * What kind of objections did you typically face before they signed the check? * And for the benefit of the startup community, can you describe how you acquired these customers (i.e., personal contacts, cold calling, selling at relevant trade shows, etc?). ====== sebg I found a web startup here on HN that is based on a subscription model :: <https://www.timesvr.com/> . They were using PayPal subscription services when I joined and left. I am interested in these questions as well as security and data retention issues. ------ lbrandy Here's another question: How do you handle billing? ------ ddemchuk I'm interested in all of those questions because I have two ideas for apps that are in the same market but one targets consumers and the other targets professionals...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How are the new Google Drive/Dropbox plans so cheap? - christiangenco Several months ago, Dropbox dropped their price[1] to $10/month for 1 TB, matching Google Drive[2].<p>But cloud storage providers charge a multiplier more than this:<p>* S3[3] is $0.0220 per GB at scale for reduced redundancy, or $22.53/month * Google Cloud Storage[4] is $0.02/GB for reduced redundancy, or $20.48/month. * Microsoft Azure[5] is $0.0224 per GB at scale, or $22.94/month.<p>The only cloud provider that comes close is Amazon Glacier[3] at $0.0100 per GB, or $10.24/month, but you have to wait 4 hours for your data.<p>These prices are just for <i>storage</i> - not including any transfer to/from the user.<p>What am I missing? How in the world can Dropbox and Google charge less than half of what <i>just the raw storage</i> would cost?<p>Is Dropbox taking advantage of most users not actually using their full 1 TB? Are they losing money when someone actually stores that much stuff? Is this some kind of de-duplication magic? Do they have access to a cheaper method of storage than the rest of us?<p>1. https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/08/introducing-more-powerful-dropbox-pro/ 2. https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en 3. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ 4. https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing 5. http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/ ====== byoung2 Previous discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8233328](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8233328) ~~~ christiangenco Ahh excellent - this is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you! From that discussion, it looks like Dropbox: 1\. probably has lower costs than the published S3 rates 2\. compresses and de-duplicates their data 3\. oversells, so most people must not be using their full 1 TB.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Hard Truth About Socialism (Stefan Molyneux) - GyYZTfWBfQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RNZ2LjpEl4 ====== cphoover Why is this on hacker news? ~~~ GyYZTfWBfQw For the same reason any other submissions concerning political philosophy, economics, etc. are. Quite many of those "off-topic" submissions climbed up to the top; probably because people here were interested enough in them. :) If anyone is interested, and have any questions regarding the topic, feel free to ask! I am sure many people would love to join and be of help as well. ~~~ dang No, this is definitely off topic because it is ideological flamebait and that leads to ideological flamewar, the last thing we want here. Generic ideological tangents, and generic discussion generally, is off topic on HN. Its signal/noise ratio is too low.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The surprising and continuing influence of Swami Vivekananda (2012) - signa11 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303404704577305581227233656 ====== duncancarroll If you're interested in someone who both loves Yoga & meditation, and tends toward a rational bent, you should also check out Gopi Krishna. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopi_Krishna_(yogi)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopi_Krishna_$yogi$) He was a pretty normal guy living a pretty normal life in the 1900's, and in his 30's through meditation he had a textbook enlightenment experience which resulted in a metamorphosis of sorts that he ultimately came to believe was biological / physiological in nature and could be repeated in others. He's one of the first if not the first person to suggest that what we think of as enlightenment is actually a biological event that the human body can perform given the right triggers, rather than simply a different state of mind or frame of thought. This is a revolutionary idea if you think about it; talk about "hacking the brain". The great thing about him is he's very relatable and not aloof, he kept his job as a government clerk and aside from selling a small handful of books, was clearly not interested in making money off his ideas. He tried for years to raise interest in the scientific community to study the phenomenon, but of course grant money is hard to come by, and doubly hard if you're doing anything remotely unconventional, so his research foundation never took off and he passed away in I think it was 1981. A lot of people don't know about him, but they've started putting his books on Kindle so you can go check them out. All of them are extraordinary reads, although I'd start with his prose, and then move to his poetry if you're interested in that. [http://www.amazon.com/Gopi- Krishna/e/B00IPU7XD4/ref=sr_ntt_s...](http://www.amazon.com/Gopi- Krishna/e/B00IPU7XD4/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_2?qid=1411864845&sr=8-2) ~~~ dominotw Maybe this is a wrong context to ask this question. Can someone tell me what exactly is a mystical experience and how it differs from normal human experience. When does one consider himself enlightened? ~~~ alphaandomega A mystical experience happens through unity, an everyday human experience through duality. Duality is when you unconsciously make a distinction between you and your thoughts and perceptions. "I think therefore I am" is the subject observing his thoughts, this is duality. When you silence your mind, you just are and then there is no opportunity for you to define yourself, to make distinction between what you are and what you're not. "I am all that is" is the subject realizing there is no separation between him and his perceptions, this is unity. Yoga is one systematic way of cultivating this silence that is required to access those mystical states of mind. As for enlightenment, I could not say because I'm not ;). ------ th3iedkid Some brilliant quotes from this : >> Faith, he wrote, must be based upon direct experience, not religious platitudes. >>More presciently, he warned that India would remain a vanquished, impoverished land until it "elevated" the status of women. So apt with current state of affairs in india!In fact (am from india) , every time any female from family (female) has to go out , a male always accompanies them!Sadly even kids are not spared from this!Hope the everyone learns to respect them in india rather than look at them as on object or thing! >>'If there is a God, we must see him. And if there is a soul, we must perceive it.' ~~~ dominotw >>Faith, he wrote, must be based upon direct experience, not religious platitudes. If one can objectively establish something by their own experience doesn't that just become a fact? Why do we need faith in the first place. ~~~ shadowfox Not defending the particular point of view above. But to me it looks like a lot of personal experience is just personal; it is subjective and it is hard to establish a particular experience as "fact" without widespread consensus. So faith might be necessary in the meantime. ------ slurry Vivekananda also lives on as an icon for the RSS and other extreme right wing Hindu groups. Here for example is RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat speaking in front of a big Vivekananda picture: [http://samvada.org/files/Independence-Day-Bangalore- Aug-15-2...](http://samvada.org/files/Independence-Day-Bangalore- Aug-15-2012-761.jpg) Maybe they claim him wrongly? IDK. ~~~ srean All I would say is, do not let those scumbags distance you from reading about this guy. They have been trying to 'churchify' hinduism since ever and playing fast and loose with history and building this identity of "a racially and spiritually superior never-did-nothing-wrong majority that has been repeatedly wronged" that now needs to collect its dues and reclaim its prestige. It is striking how often that line works. But yeah, expect downvotes because many people believe that crap. More true among Indians outside of India and in particular regions within, perhaps fuelled by the urge to connect with their roots. That is a perfectly legitimate emotion, just spoiled by the presence of these people who try to make some quick religio-political capital out of it. ------ anizan Maharishi Ramana is someone who truly was a maharishi and attained atma gyan(enlightenment). [http://bhagavan-ramana.org/nanyar.html](http://bhagavan- ramana.org/nanyar.html) [http://www.sriramanamaharshi.org/wp- content/uploads/2012/12/...](http://www.sriramanamaharshi.org/wp- content/uploads/2012/12/Talks_Exract.pdf) ------ shnt this lecture [http://goo.gl/Fo1ZLJ](http://goo.gl/Fo1ZLJ) has a whole lot of detail about the influence of yoga in the west. ------ dschiptsov The amount of nonsense which has been written about yoga (Vedanta and Buddhism) is, ironically, matches the amount of nonsense about OOP and Java.) Yoga, at least according to the yoga sutra of Patanjali is *unity with the whole (That)", through unity of mind and body via breath as a preliminary practice, without which any further "realizations" are impossible (training routine). Vedanta, which is rather mediocre "systematization" of Upanishads has been profoundly summarized by Ramakrishna - "Wanna see God? Look between two thoughts." (at the source/origin of thoughts). This is enough for realizing one's "true nature" (which is popular culture associated with a ray of light - pure energy). The essence of Buddha's teaching is "life is shaped by our mind, we become what we think", which directly points to the mind as the ultimate source of all "suffering". (Problems doesn't exist outside one's head. Just physical processes). There is also Rumi, who had the same realizations, but put them in different words. The problem with all these fine and subtle teachings is, like Sartre pointed out, "the other people" with their stupid ambitions and flawed actions. Instead of yoga we have gymnastics (in some cases even acrobatics) and whole industry of yoga pants and joints when they are sited for $30/h. Instead of Vedanta we have the same mysticism, where all the deities are morphed into the one. Instead of Buddhims - tons of narcissistic graphomany published by Snow Lion and the others. So, no, so-called piece of mind comes not from yoga courses or a crowded retreat, but form realization of being an inseparable part of the whole, of That (or being in accordance with Tao, or "letting God/Love in", etc, etc.) It is in being "in balance" (in Eastern terms), non-contradicting with the whole. I am guide for Himalaya and Tibet region for a few years now - and I could tell that all the magic and miracles, mantras, mandalas, sacred rituals or any form of shamanism "working" only in the realm of one's mind, and does not exist outside it.) ------ LeicaLatte spam! ------ houseofshards Not sure why this article is on Hacker News. ~~~ dang History is in scope here.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Building .NET projects is a world of pain and here's how we should solve it - maartenba http://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2014/04/11/Building-NET-projects-is-a-world-of-pain-and-heres-how-we-should-solve-it.aspx ====== jeswin Building .Net projects cannot really be solved in a way that compares well with nix systems. \- Windows had no programmability until recently with Powershell. On Linux, I can script literally everything from database installs to component updates. \- Powershell. Unfortunately they got their design wrong. Unix is a text and file based OS; you can script any server configuration with tools like awk. Windows apps doesn't have such a concept. To do stuff, you call... duh.. API!* \- The above resulted in millions of programmers not really getting it. Need a component, alright an MSI file. They don't understand how programmability of the environment can vastly simplify the act of programming itself. \- NuGet solves only a part of the problem. For non-trivial projects, there are tons of things that you need to automate besides library references. In short, Windows is horrible if you have used anything else. And that is by design gone wrong, somewhere in the 90s. * When they made the decision to build Powershell, they also had a chance to adopt bash or cygwin. I consider this a historic loss; the lack of a familiar/tasteful shell effectively shut (many of) the best programmers out of the Windows eco-system forever. ~~~ wesnerm2 Even before PowerShell, Windows had thousands of COM objects in the system that can invoked within a scripting language like .vbs or any language that has APIs for accessing com objects like ActiveState perl. The Windows Explorer shell, Windows Media Player, not to mention Microsoft Office applications, have object models that are exposed and available to programmed against. I am not so sure that UNIX has anything better, since it seems all the functionality that UNIX has is also available in Windows. Then, there is also WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) objects for all the low-level system operations. ~~~ Negitivefrags I'd just like to add to this that *nix developers don't appreciate COM for what it really added to windows. In Linux you only generally call C functions from higher level languages (and sometimes C++). Python programmers use python libraries and sometimes C libraries. Ruby programmers use ruby libraries and sometimes C libraries. Never will you see someone calling in to a Ruby library from a Python program. On windows via COM you get Perl calling in to C++ calling in to C# calling in to VB.NET. ------ cincinnatus It's just a different bag of hurt but no more so than node or ruby. Setting up ruby boxes makes me homicidal, whereas .net feels like nothing. But then I have much more experience with the latter, and 'evolved' with it and it's precursors. That said, building .net is relatively trivial and it's tools are caught up. I think what he's looking for is [http://fsharp.github.io/FAKE/](http://fsharp.github.io/FAKE/) ~~~ lipoicacid After 7 years of setting up ruby servers, I can't say it's ever made me homicidal. RVM and rbenv on multiple different distributions have generally all been fine. What did your distro/environment look like? ------ MichaelGG >Let’s look at the Node.js community and how they manage to do things Node.js? The one that pulls in like 10,000 files to run a simple grunt build? ~~~ chton It's not perfect, but at least you don't have to manually install 10,000 files just to be able to build in the first place. Or worry that your build server is running on the wrong version of Windows. Or even do anything special to get it to build. It's not perfect, but it's better than what we have now by a huge margin. ------ oblio This is something Microsoft needs to push instead of the insane MSI stuff. Microsoft really needs an officially sanctioned dependency manager, maybe NuGet. Something with a standardized package format based on _archives_, not _executable installers_. The Microsoft ecosystem is light years behind OSS in this regard. Heck, CPAN was designed in 1993 and became available in 1997. Truly light years - CPAN predates the dot-com boom. ~~~ maartenba The good CPAN times :-) It was a bit of a cumbersome thing to work with as a newbie back then but at least it handled dependencies very well. ~~~ lucian1900 In many ways CPAN is _still_ state of the art. It has first-class support for namespacing and mirroring, which appears to still elude most environments' packaging systems. And I'm saying this as someone that dislikes Perl a lot. ~~~ luser I did some research on CPAN - comparing it to Ruby gems and Python's various packaging solutions... CPAN is the defacto Perl standard, mirroring and testing built in. With perlbrew, localLib and cpanm, the tooling for Perl is world class. I think Ruby and Python are still catching up here. No doubt they will, but CPAN is an amazing feat of engineering. ------ ndepoel NuGet gets the job done admirably, but it was simply introduced too late; nearly 10 years after the introduction of .NET. It's good to see NuGet has gained traction very quickly, but there are still plenty of projects predating NuGet that have solved the dependency management problem in their own unique way. Migrating all of those to NuGet takes time and willing maintainers. ~~~ anton_gogolev NuGet itself leaves a lot to be desired. For one, it's used to install all kinds of crap (like jQuery) and sometimes has all too tight dependency on Visual Studio in its .ps1 scripts. Next, all the mess with having assemblies for different versions of .NET Framework inside single nupkg -- I want to see the person who decided this will be a good idea. Third, why include version numbers in directory names? To make it harder to update dependencies? Fourth, dependencies. "[1.3.2,1.5)" \- how cool is this? Fifth, the whole "Package Restore" concept is flawed. ~~~ chton Why would installing something like jQuery be a bad fit for Nuget? It's a dependency like any other, just because it's in JS doesn't mean you shouldn't handle it the same way you would other packages. Versions in directory names make sense if you've got multiple projects depending on different versions of the same package. Upgrading everything at once isn't always an option. Could you elaborate why package restore is flawed? And do you have an alternative that doesn't involve putting all your dependencies in source control? ~~~ anton_gogolev Because there's a ton of package managers for JavaScript and NuGet is reinventing the wheel here, squared. Granted, very few (if any) of them work on Windows, but that's outside the scope here. And even if we accept that it's OK for NuGet to install JS dependencies, where do we draw the line? Install Bootstrap with NuGet? FontAwesome? Should NuGet execute SQL scripts while installing Elmah? Install MSI packages as part of "install-package"? All in all, DLLs are the most dominant type of dependencies for .NET and NuGet should laser-focus on those. As for multiple projects within the same solution depending on different versions of packages, that's asking for trouble. And again, why default to the illogical behavior of including version numbers in directory names when this is only justified in like 0.1% of cases? Package Restore is _very_ fragile, both in terms "what happens if NuGet server is down" and in terms of "Visual Studio has gone mad and does weird shit trying to restore packages". And I saw you using "source control" implying that the only thing to belong there are text-only source files. What if we call it "version control"? This will magically allow us to put all the binary dependencies and live a happy life. Cheers! ~~~ chton There's a ton of package managers, but none that are as built into the platform as nuget is. On top of that, what advantage would there be in having multiple package managers? All you're doing is making the package management harder by splitting it up. How would I indicate my Nuget package depends on a specific version of jQuery? The line is simple to draw: Nuget should never install anything. It's not chocolatey or aptitude. It provides versioned files, no more. That is its focus, and should remain it, no matter what those files contain. DLLs are dominant, but definitely not the only type of dependency. Dependencies on text files, javascript, or just about anything else need to be versionable using the same system. If not, you would run into the issues mentioned above. Multiple projects with different version dependencies might usually be a bad idea, but it's still something you need to support. Unlike some other systems, Nuget can't be opinionated about how you manage your projects. If it was, it would be dropped like a rock by enterprises that don't want to adapt to the package manager of choice. If that makes it harder to do something the platform does for you, nobody really loses. Package restore is more fragile than local assemblies, yes. We've seen that a few times lately when Nuget was down. These are risks that can be mitigated though, by providing mirrors and a decent local cache. Putting any sort of binary dependency in a version control system is a problem. They can't be compared to previous versions. Unless you make folders for each version of the package you depend on, you also can't depend on different versions in your projects. And worst of all, if a dev decides to replace a package, it could break something else. Those (and others) are exactly the reasons package managers were created in the first place. ------ LoneWolf Instead of node I would say look at Maven, I never had a problem with a java project that used maven, all I ever needed was maven, and a JDK. It may not be the best out there but to me seems pretty good considering it is as simple as download source code, and run "mvn package". ~~~ mateuszf IMO maven in nowhere near in comparison with how npm works with modules. ------ anton_gogolev If you have a couple minutes, take a look inside any of the Microsoft-shipped .targets file to see the mess in its full glory. That's programming in XML, kids. It boggles my mind why Microsoft went the XML route when designing MSBuild (apparently they were copying NAnt and various other "enterprise-grade" build systems from the Java world), but it would be _so much_ better if they created a special DSL for this particular purpose. When I see this, I want to kill a puppy or two: Condition="'%(Identity)' != '@(SelectedFiles)'" ~~~ mgkimsal Considering there's a move in the Java world to Gradle, a DSL approach, yeah... MS could have jumped to the head of the class by avoiding this XML years ago and put more forward-thinking effort in this area. But... this isn't a new criticism of MS. In most areas, they simply adapt to what the prevailing trend is. ------ gecko Not that I'm really against this article, but psake ([https://github.com/psake/psake](https://github.com/psake/psake)) is a more realistic end-goal to handle the kind of flexibility you really need in projects. (It's accomplishable through MSBuild pre/post actions, but those are murder to edit anywhere but Visual Studio.) The problem with it, which is potentially a big one, is that psake uses PowerShell, and is therefore Windows-only. I'm hopeful that PowerShell can be ported to Unix soon as part of the general open-sourcing of Microsoft's .NET stack. I wouldn't use PowerShell as a replacement for bash, but as a cross-platform equivalent to Groovy/CRaSH, it'd be very handy for exactly this kind of thing. (Think of how Gradle fits into the Java world.) ~~~ profquail If you want to run on both Windows and UNIX-style systems, try FAKE ([https://github.com/fsharp/FAKE](https://github.com/fsharp/FAKE)). It's rapidly becoming a popular choice for building all sorts of .NET projects. Scott Hanselman recently covered it on his blog: [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ExploringFAKEAnFBuildSystemFor...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ExploringFAKEAnFBuildSystemForAllOfNET.aspx) ~~~ jinushaun Or use Rake with Albacore, a Windows/MSBuild plugin for Rake, and be done with it. ------ jinushaun The biggest offender for me, besides nuget being pretty much useless for real work, is that you need to install Visual Studio to automate _headless_ ASP.NET builds! That's insane. Even the simplest most barebones ASP project requires it. As a result, our Chef scripts include downloading and installing a bunch of MSIs from S3. I would love to be proven wrong. ------ romanovcode > Let’s look at the Node.js community and how they manage to do things. I think NuGet is much better then npm. When you download something from NuGet you get a dll file that is injected in your References. When you download something with npm --save-dev you get 1000+ files. Just sayin' ------ rat87 [http://earlyandoften.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/dependency- man...](http://earlyandoften.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/dependency-management- in-net/) ------ mattmanser I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. This seems to be exactly where MS are moving to with nuget. Like all the new stuff, the WebAPIs, EF 6, OData, etc. is now being published as NuGet packages instead of installers or SDKs or whatever. NuGet seems to be a direct response to this very issue and you constantly mention it. So what are you asking? After all they can't change the past! ~~~ chton Microsoft is increasingly doing it with their frameworks and components, but not for real SDKs. Windows 8 and Phone development still requires an installer to build. It's not just Microsoft though. Other vendors need to jump on the same bandwagon. Right now, almost nobody really does, definitely nobody who sells to the enterprise market. ~~~ JonoW I think they just need to separate out the tools from the libraries, within the SDKs, i.e. all libraries through NuGet, everything else can still be an Msi, as a dev will need things like emulators and VS tooling add-ins, but none of this is needed for build server just to build the project ~~~ chton I whole-heartedly agree. It does create some danger there of mismatching versions between the tooling and the nuget packages. What do we do if the user has upgraded to a newer version of the package, but hasn't updated his emulator yet? Vice versa is somewhat easier to enforce, but either way it will require careful checking and notifying of the devs. ------ yvesgoeleven You're right, we need to fix the sdk's as well to tackle dll hell.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
MVC Podcast Episode 13: Tech Mentorship; MS Vis Studio; Bitcoin; Gigster; More - martystepp http://mvc-the-podcast.github.io/2015/12/22/episode-13-secret-santas-secret-identities-mentorship.html ====== martystepp MVC Podcast Episode 13 is up! This is a geek podcast where a university CS instructor (Marty) and a developer at a major tech company (Victoria) talk about the week's tech/geek news, with a focus on topics of interest to computer scientists / programmers. This week, Victoria and I have a discussion about mentorship in tech; Microsoft open-sourcing Visual Studio; Bitcoin; Yahoo; Gigster; and we give our hot takes on Secret Santa and White Elephant gift exchanges. Check it out, and Happy Holidays!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Projects and applications for e-ink displays - jeanlucas What are some interesting projects and applications for e-ink displays? ====== Artemix \- Ebook-like reading tools \- Watches, low-power embedded displays \- Low-cost screens	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
LivingSocial Financials: $2.9 Billion Valuation, $50M In Revenue Per Month - McKittrick http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/15/livingsocial-financials-exposed-2-9-billion-valuation-50-million-in-revenue-per-month/ ====== rebelidealist How come news media never talk about profits when it comes to tech startups? Profits should be the key ingredient for valuation. A huge percentage of Living Social's revenue goes back to the businesses. ~~~ vaksel Because those numbers would be too disappointing. ------ anonymous246 I'm finding it really hard to justify TechCrunch's continued practice of publishing purloined documents _when there is no public interest at stake_. ~~~ phlux Its called Digital Douchebaggery -- and expect it to continue so long as TC can regularly position itself in the center of any tech gossip available.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How do you do off-site backups? - jkamdjou What services or tools do you use for automating and securely backing up your personal and work systems? ====== benologist I use Synology Drive, a program like Dropbox, all my work is in that and it backs up to my NAS and that backs up to Dropbox. ~~~ mister_hn +1 me too	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Instagram’s founder, a marketer who learned to code at night - ra5cal http://thenextweb.com/2012/04/10/instagrams-ceo-had-no-formal-programming-training-hes-a-marketer-who-learned-to-code-by-night/ ====== louhong This is very misleading - his Quora answer (below) means that been involved (if at a limited capacity) with coding since he was very young. "Depends what you mean by coding. I've been programming here and there since I was in middle school. In high school I was excused from my foreign language requirement so I could take more computer science classes. The first real class I took was in Pascal, and then later in c++. Independently I started playing with MySQL and PHP, but never did anything significant. My freshman year at Stanford I took CS106X which was the first year's worth of CS in 1 quarter (it's usually two). I wouldn't say I did so well... I looked around and saw so many fantastically smart folks in that class and decided I was better off majoring in something like business. Looking back I wish I had stuck with it. It turns out that no undergrad class prepares you to start a startup -- you learn most of it as you do it." Source: [http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-kevin-systrom-a-qa- the-2...](http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-kevin-systrom-a-qa-the-28-year- old-who-just-sold-his-startup-to-facebook-for-1-billion-2012-4#ixzz1rekicv2z) ------ dmk23 This just goes to show that the most critical ingredient to success is determination and focus, not any specific training. If you are committed to a goal, picking up any specific hands-on skills (coding included) is just the matter of sticking to it. Something to keep in mind when hiring. ~~~ melling "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On, has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race." Calvin Coolidge "If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go through with it." John Carmack ~~~ villagefool Is it still true? can you actually do much nowdays (in that scale) on a cheap PC? it seems like heavy machines/cloud access is crucial ~~~ matwood A cheap PC today is way more powerful than PCs of just a couple years ago. Server rooms have shrunk not just because of the cloud, but because the same amount of work can get done with less machine. John Carmacks quote becomes more pertinent as time goes on because computing power is only becoming cheaper. And to directly address your point, the common person now has access to more computing power than ever before at a cost lower than ever in history because of the cloud. If anything the barriers to entry continue to drop leaving only our lack of persistence as what stands between us and success. ~~~ ceph_ >Server rooms have shrunk not just because of the cloud, but because the same amount of work can get done with less machine. The demand for servers and compute power has increased because of the cloud. Just because server rooms have turned into datacenters does not mean they "shrunk", quite the opposite. ~~~ matwood When I started at my previous company we had a server room that was full of computers. When I left we had consolidated to a single rack, and nothing had been moved to the cloud. While the companies demand for compute power went up during the time I worked there, the compute power available in a single machine went up faster than the demand. ------ simondlr Not entirely true though. He's been coding for a long time. He studied management science and engineering. It's not as if he wasn't technical before he started with instagram. ~~~ hej Today, nearly everyone has been coding for a long time. Everyone learns the basics in school. At college or university many will have a lot of further contact with many computer science concepts. It’s a lot like math, really: everyone knows the basics (or has at least heard them once and promptly forgotten them), but that doesn’t make everyone a mathatician. (My dad, a construction engineer, learnt programming at college in the freaking late 70s. He never needed it during his long and successful career as a construction engineer, though, and has forgotten all about it. Today, anyone who studies anything to do with social sciences – for example – needs to have some coding skills if they want to do effective statistical analysis.) There is a difference between that and building your own app. ~~~ disgruntledphd2 I'm sorry but as a graduate trained social scientist (psychologist), this is simply not true (for the social sciences at least). I do know how to program (R mostly, some python and java) but I am an extreme outlier with my field. In fact, people are ridiculously impressed at my use of awk and regex to extract relevant articles from a CSV file. I would agree that everyone who studies the social sciences should have some familiarity with coding, but SPSS refutes your claim that it is a necessity. In addition, I had never coded a line before the age of 28 (I'm almost 31 now). ~~~ randomdata I'm 30 and I remember being taught the basics (in BASIC, no less) of programming in elementary school. My father talks about programming on punch cards when he was in high school. We both went to the same small rural schools, not even big city institutions. Given that, I'm with the parent. It does seem kind of amazing that virtually anyone in the workforce today in North America didn't have at least some programming training. Whether they still remember is another matter, but I guess everyone comes from a different background. ------ blackysky I find the story misleading .... it is one thing to build a prototype and another thing to create an app to support millions of people and their pictures.. on top of that he has great connection and a great environment .... you must check the big picture and not just take one element to create that cinderella story.... by the way his co founder is a real CS genius .... let's face it ...it is easy to raise money right now in this crazy environment...I don't take away his hard work and talent but just check the picture too.... ------ griperson It is good to know that there are GOOD marketers-turned-programmers in the world. I work with someone who bills himself as a programmer, in fact was hired to be "senior developer." This "senior developer" isn't. Instead, he's a marketer and bullshitter who lied his way into his position. He's not coded a single thing in the 8 months of his employ. Instead he has had his position changed to "marketing director" because "that's his niche." I wonder what impact being around world-class engineers are Google had on Systrom's path. ------ sayemm Regardless of how experienced he was technically, think this is another case, among many, that demonstrate just how important it is to have sharp marketing instincts. Behind every internet hit was a lot of clever marketing and positioning that really made it (facebook, zynga, groupon, mint, plentyoffish, hotornot, the list goes on). ------ plant42 Fair play to him. He's achieved to what many here aspire. I cannot begrudge him the success because he's NOT a developer. If he was a developer and not a marketer, would the community be judging or discussing him in the same way? ------ whatmypassword So I'm curious...what programming language did he learn and use for instagram? ~~~ ojbyrne The way I parse it is he built something in html5, and showed it at a party. ~~~ dpritchett Owen, this is clearly a situation in which your insight is more valuable than most other people's. Care to elaborate on the Digg parallels? ~~~ ojbyrne I don't really want to draw parallels, because I don't know anyone at Instagram, but this really feels like a standard Silicon Valley puff piece to make the newly wealthy insiderish person look like a renaissance man. I'm going to guess that along with the $500k came the admonition to hire real engineers stat. ------ zdgman I would like to believe that his skill at coding had less to do with it versus the connections he had and the people he surrounded himself with. As quite a few people have pointed out here going to Stanford in any capacity and graduating gives you a huge leg up in terms of the potential Alumni you can now reach out to. Right place/Right Time/Right Product is what this boils down to. I am also assuming that he did not write most of what is the current Instagram code. Funny that no one mentions that Mike Krieger as his Cofounder in addition to the other engineers on the team. ~~~ zdgman I am going to reply to my own comment and also note that their first engineering hire, Shayne Sweeney also didn't go to college for programming. ------ EXPERT_Coder What's so hard to believe about that? Are there any programmers who aren't self taught these days . . . ~~~ rhizome Tons. Most. ------ denysonique I thought that most tech entrepreneurs have learned to code by themselves. ------ zerostar07 Is that true about Codeacademy? ------ tila another big dollar sign, another over'night' myth. ------ StCroix From the article: Unlike Mark Zuckerberg, the man responsible for acquiring the popular photo sharing app for $1 billion, Systrom received no formal engineering training. From Systrom's bio on Instagram: Kevin graduated from Stanford University in 2006 with a BS in Management Science & Engineering—he got his first taste of the startup world when he was an intern at Odeo that later became Twitter. He spent two years at Google—the first of which was working on Gmail, Google Reader, and other products... Gotta love the spin. ~~~ capdiz Spin aside. His story would be really inspiring for folks i have met who think that for one to learn how to program, they need to go to Uni and apply for a cs degree which is bullshit. ~~~ pagekalisedown The problem is that a lot of HR departments won't consider people without degrees. A Stanford degree opens a lot of doors. This is one of the reasons I have a lot of hope in online education. When it becomes mainstream, HR departments won't be able to ignore it. ~~~ mikecane >>>The problem is that a lot of HR departments won't consider people without degrees. Aren't people who are motivated to teach themselves coding the very kind of people who would want to _avoid_ dealing with Suit HR departments? Wouldn't they be more interested in working at a smaller firm, especially a startup, if they had to work for someone else at all? ~~~ dpritchett Sure, but the fewer alternatives you have available to you the less control you have over your market rate. Ideally you'd like to be eminently qualified and command a bigco salary at a strong small firm.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
GCE vs. AWS: Why You Should Never Use Amazon - ayberk https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-in-2016-why-you-should-never-use-amazon/ ====== sudosteph I'm always extra-skeptical about devs who choose to use click-baity titles to explain why a widely used piece infrastructure is useless. The merits and demerits of AWS have been discussed in depth by folks with way more experience and knowledge than this author, and in most cases "Never Use Amazon" would be found as a laughable conclusion. Nevertheless, I hope AWS reads this to get an idea about how they still need to improve their accessibility and image as a company overall. It's completely true that the transparency and accuracy of the "status page" is terrible because no product team wants to admit something went wrong. It's also true that their Premium Support is constantly overwhelmed and often not incredibly useful but still essential for many cases (This basically boils down to them having huge turnover rate, a low number of people who actually have skills to do the high-level support, and having too many ways to "game" the system where customers who spend nearly nothing get away with taking way too much support time and substituting paying actual architects with constant support cases. Increasing cost of support would actually be the best move here.) Regardless, this plays into the narrative that I've always observed. AWS, despite being easy to get going with, is also incredibly easy to mess up. The fact that there is a certification system spanning so many different parts of AWS should go to show the disconnect between how much AWS actually expects you to master before using it, and how much the average dev really wants to learn before jumping in (reading a blog post is not gonna cut it.) ~~~ nvarsj Yes the title is click baity to the extreme. The author hasn't used GCE extensively (has anyone?), so recommending GCE is disingenuous. Despite that, I found the article to be a good summary of some of AWS's worse sore points. EBS performance really is a dog. He failed to mention c3 instance types though, which also have locally attached SSDs. ------ nik736 Why is bare metal so "uncool"? I am certain that a lot of companies don't need the flexibility provided by AWS. I can understand that you don't need additional staff by going with the AWS route, but in the end you get a bare vm which is kinda similar to a bare metal server – you have to manage it yourself. Things like RDS isn't good idea anyways, let it be in the startup phase (expensive) or later on (inflexible, etc.)... The only service I could think of which is really helpful is SES, because handling email is very stressful. And even if you need the flexibility you can still run your predictable stuff on bare metal, while, when the traffic spikes, spin on some cloud servers as you need them. But things like load balancing are always better handled on own servers, where you actually know what the fuck is happening. ~~~ abrookewood Bare metal isn't uncool .. it just requires someone who is willing to manage it. That includes rushing to the data centre at 3 a.m. to fix a failed power supply or a hard drive. In comparison, with a cloud provider and a proper architecture, a huge number of problems just disappear: if your server stops responding, it is automatically killed off and replaced; there is no need to worry about the operational overhead of managing a DB (backups, clustering, recovery etc) when you just consume it as a service; you don't really need to worry about maintaining a separate disaster recovery site when it is actually easier just to run in active-active mode; when your box is no longer adequately sized, you just stop it and restart it as something larger. Cloud computing provides a huge number of benefits - once you have used it, it is pretty hard to go back to managing your own hardware. That said, it isn't always the best option and it certainly isn't always the cheapest. ~~~ bogomipz There's something called "remote hands" and the big DC operators like Equnix offer it. I haven't been in a DC in years. Also just because its bare metal doesn't mean you don't need to design for failure just the same as do with AWS. And those problems don't just disappear by using AWS they just turn into different problems, certainly more opaque, like IP addresses that disappear from underneath you and the noisy neighbor problem. Its interesting to me that there is now a generation that isn't familiar with hardware. Knowing hardware will never count against you, especially if you want to do consulting or go work for a cloud provider or need to run a hybrid cloud. ~~~ abrookewood You're right, remote hands is available, but in my experience (7+ years managing a DC in another country), it is expensive, inexperienced and slow to respond. If an issue occurs in a DC that's a drive away, I'll usually send a staff member because I know that the job will be done correctly and (usually) quicker. You're also right that the problems don't disappear, but they are certainly easier to resolve in a cloud environment. I have had boxes fail and get replaced in the time that it would normally take me to wake up and logon to work out what the issue is. I also agree that knowing hardware 'doesn't hurt' (it's where I started), but it also comes at a cost - the time required to learn and understand it. If you were starting out in IT today, would it make sense to spend time on that, or maybe learn about programming or architecture or something else. I don't know the answer, but it's certainly something to think about. ~~~ bogomipz It's expensive but its also lot cheaper than paying someone full time that might not be needed full time. It depends. The difference in metal vs a cloud provider is that with bare metal you can dive deeper into why things are failing beyond what you might with a cloud provider. That may or may not be important to you. It depends. With a cloud provider you often just spin up new instances and hope they land somewhere better. If you were starting out in IT today it would absolutely make sense to learn hardware. The cloud is just somebody else's hardware. ------ nolite > "Unfortunately, our infrastructure on AWS is working " > "I learned recently that we are a profitable company, more so than I > thought. Looking at the top 10 companies by revenue per employee, we’d be in > the top 10." Congratulations. You just convinced me to go with AWS ~~~ 0xmohit As somebody who is stuck with AWS for now, I wish you luck. You would have real fun when one of your running instances shuts down on it's own (and possibly comes back after some time), and would be pointed to the AWS SLA upon asking them what had happened. You would have more fun when rebooting an instance would take 2 hours to be told that there was some _underlying issue with the hardware_. For samples of the responses that you get from AWS: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11822298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11822298) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11822544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11822544) ~~~ bradhe > You would have real fun when one of your running instances shuts down on > it's own Or you could author software and systems that aren't so brittle that the loss of a single machine is problematic for you. Seriously, your engineering practices need some love if this is a problem. ~~~ 0xmohit I fail to understand such arguments. Does that imply that every single webpage in the world needs to be behind a load balancer with unwarranted amounts of redundancy in place? And if one doesn't do that, it's ok if the site is down. ~~~ PeterisP Well, yes, that's exactly the point - a single site without redundancy does mean that you _will_ get some hours of downtime every now and then; either it's ok if the site is down for such time, or extra redundancy is actually warranted. ------ stevesun21 Let me tell you the different between use bare metal and use AWS, as current my position in a startup, I am the only developer, our system includes more than three services for two different type of users and admin. I coded all these services and put them online within 2.5 months, and all these possible is because I use AWS. There is no way if I use bare metal. (I have been there before) If you truly understand how to design your system in cloud infrastructure fashion rather than try to manage the way to use a cloud infrastructure as a bare metal, then, you can have a really long term benefits. ------ jttam Most instance types you can launch with ephemeral disk that is local SSD. All recent generation servers are like this. m3s, etc. You don't need to launch an i2. There are a lot, lot of problems with this article. ~~~ phonon If you want a BIG local SSD, no; I2 (still at the same price that it launched with almost 3 years ago!) and X1 are your only options. For fast, cheap networking and large local SSD GCE is much better (for now at least) ~~~ jttam You are probably right for big, cheap SSDs and fast networking GCE likely is the place to be. It's a newer stack. But this article fails to prove that, and it provides a lot of FUD. "Local SSD storage is only available via the i2 instances family which are the most expensive instances on AWS" \- He didn't say BIG. And gp2 is actually pretty good in my opinion. (Also, you missed the now legacy hi1 instance in your list.) Just for completeness I give you other problems in this article. I run a moderately large AWS workload, and there are definitely problems with AWS, but this article missed many of them and feels like a rant more than something with veracity. 1\. "Add 10% for dedicated instances" \- but he never brings up a competing product on GCE. There is another simple way to getting a dedicated instance: launch the largest instance type in a class, and you have dedicated hardware. 2\. "Add 10% on top of everything for Premium Support (mandatory)" \- Simply wrong. 3\. "We are forced to pay for Provisioned-IOPS whenever we need dependable IO." \- This was true 5 years ago. I'm sorry, gp2 is a fine service which runs great. 4\. "Local SSD storage is only available via the i2 instances family which are the most expensive instances on AWS" \- Wrong as stated above which you didn't even refute. You just put parameters on a use case. 5\. "An unplanned event is a guaranteed 5 minutes of unreachable site with 503 errors." \- This is certainly hyperbolic. I've sat down with the ELB team, and we've hashed through this. We had an ELB that ramped up to 600,000 rps everyday with massive spikes in that ELB's performance. They offer pre-warming as a convenience, but it's hardly necessary. The worst case scenario would be some number of 503s for some amount of time up to a maximum of 5 minutes. How does GCE perform? No answers given. 6\. "All resources are artificially limited by a hardcoded quota, which is very low by default. Limits can only be increased manually, one by one, by sending a ticket to the support." \- This isn't true in GCE? Of course it is. There isn't infinite infrastructure. The AWS limits are published, and they are kept low so, for instance, it would be difficult for a developer or a malicious user to run up a giant bill for you. Learn to plan. 7\. "There is NO log and NO indication of what’s going on in the infrastructure. The support is required whenever something wrong happens." \- Cloudwatch anyone? It gives pretty decent instrumentation of, for instance, your ELB. What does GCE give him? Not mentioned. 8\. "We have to comply to a few regulations so we have a few dedicated options here and there. It’s 10% on top of the instance price (plus a $1500 fixed monthly fee per region)." \- Amazon was a first mover in this space. I think this is a shoehorning of something that is complicated and manual on their side. What does google offer, I repeat? 9\. "A reservation is attached to a specific region, an availability zone, an instance type, a tenancy, and more." \- This is garbage. You can change reserves between availability zone and instance type (within a family of instances.) Moreover, you can sell your reserves. I agree vaguely this is effort, but it's minor effort that's generally solvable with a mild amount of planning. 10\. "The discount is small." \- It's like 40-70%, he quotes 30% on GCE. 11\. "AWS Networking is sub-par" \- I actually agree with this, it feels like an aging infrastructure, but I imagine it's something they will address. ~~~ phonon >You are probably right for big, cheap SSDs and fast networking GCE likely is the place to be. It's a newer stack. But this article fails to prove that, and it provides a lot of FUD. "Local SSD storage is only available via the i2 instances family which are the most expensive instances on AWS" \- He didn't say BIG. And gp2 is actually pretty good in my opinion. (Also, you missed the now legacy hi1 instance in your list.) Not sure what you mean by "prove"...for instances with "large" (say over 250 GB) local SSD you have I2 and X1 on AWS, both very expensive (and I don't see H1 on [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance- types/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) any more). He specifically gave what SSD sizes he uses (800 and 375 GB) so the implication is that's what he needs. It is a bit sad that to get the equivalent storage performance of a $200 Samsung 850 Pro SSD you need to spend thousands a year on AWS, and for the equivalent of a higher end PCI-e enterprise SSD, I think only the X1 is competitive (which appears to be only available at a $3.970 3-Year Partial Upfront RI Price per Hour..wow!) ~~~ phonon Not that AWS isn't great overall--just that compared to [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/02/Compute- Engine-...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/02/Compute-Engine-now- with-3-TB-of-high-speed-Local-SSD-and-64-TB-of-Persistent-Disk-per-VM.html) they are not competive for low cost and high performance storage. (And their internal networking isn't so great either for smaller instances) ~~~ jttam I don't disagree for those use cases that's very impressive. I just don't require a lot of local disk space. ------ mattkrea > AWS Premium Support is mandatory This is simply not true. We only pay 49/mo for support. Sure, you can pay for the top-level which starts at 15k/month but it is _not_ mandatory. The biggest item I'd mention to you is learn to use spot instances. I doubt Google can beat my 2 cents an hour for m3.large servers. ~~~ xref In all the AWS workloads I've dealt with none was ever suited to spot instances ~~~ mattkrea We run a bunch of production workloads on them. Just look at the spot pricing history in US-East-1A and 1B for a good idea at the stability. This is over a year now and only once did I have any sort of interruption and even there it was in only one AZ so of course I had other instances up and able to take the load. ~~~ hagbarddenstore You do know that AWS AZs are different per customer? Your us-east-1a isn't the same as my us-east-1a. ------ ilaksh I have not used AWS a LOT, but I have used it some, and did run into issues with throttling CPU and what at least seemed like random times (after some quota of cycles reached or something?). That did not happen on Linode and Digital Ocean. I cannot verify that this type of thing happens for network and larger instances but I believe him if he says it does. I'm guessing their philosophy is to be more strict so they can predict and ensure they will have available resources to spread around. For me, AWS has some things like VPCs, S3, DynamoDB, etc. that are hard to get unless you go with something like GCE and not available in VPS provider like Linode and Digital Ocean. So far I have found the smaller simpler providers to be a much better deal and generally to perform better for the same or less money. If I need those other features though then I would have to use an AWS or GCE. ~~~ soccerdave Which instance type were you using when you experienced throttling? This is a documented "feature" on a few of the instances. They give you the ability to burst for a certain amount of time but you can't burst forever. ~~~ 0xmohit You'd very often see it on t2 instances. To make things worse, it isn't obvious that throttling is causing things not to work as expected. Then you have noisy neighbors that affect you. ------ xuejie To me, the difference between GCE and AWS really has to do with "openness": while I do admit GCE machines can be faster and cheaper, you only feel like you are treated somewhat equally as the big corps when using AWS. For example, Lambda has been released to the general public for quite some time, while on the other hand, Google Cloud Function is still in invite-only phase. I do love Google, they are building many awesome products(personally Chromebook is my favourite computing device now, if only I don't have the tech requirements that is only doable on a Mac -_-), but when it comes to GCE, it really gives one the sense that they are only aiming at big corporations right now, for small startups or individuals doing side project, AWS is significantly better. For me, this is an advantage even tho I have to sacrifice a little performance ~~~ boulos Google Cloud Functions is in Alpha. It's not being held back for "the big corps", in fact most big companies won't touch any product that isn't Generally Available (and therefore backed by an SLA). It's just a product that's still in development, and changing a lot! They'll be in Beta soon enough, and then anyone can use it. Until then, they're following our usual launch phases ([https://cloud.google.com/terms/launch- stages](https://cloud.google.com/terms/launch-stages)). If you want to try it out (and provide feedback, and deal with potentially large changes), I'm sure they'd be happy to whitelist you: send me your info (address in my profile). Disclosure: I work at Google on Compute Engine (but I know the folks on Cloud Functions). ~~~ xuejie Awesome, thanks for the answer! In that case I will wait a bit(already signed up for the form but didn't got a reply). ------ abrookewood The article conveniently ignores things like the number of services available, the ability to find staff who are familiar with the platform, the availability of data centres in your location, the depth/breadth of the available APIs, market share and so on ... Sure, if the only thing that you care about is cost, maybe you should use GCE. Alternatively, if you're really serious about saving money, then perhaps you should buy some second hand servers and host it yourself. ------ Annatar You would think that the author would have learned his lesson after all the bad experiences with the (Amazon) cloud, but no: his solution is to go to another cloud provider. And even then, GCE? If the author requires insight into system performance and the ability to debug, then Joyent is the place to go to, not GCE or anyone else. I do not understand these people, nor do I purport to: a half-decent, 32GB of memory, 4 TB internal disk, octo core intel system (made by intel) costs around $1,800 USD, that is a one time cost, plus recurring electricity costs. Meanwhile, the author's company pays $1,500 just in monthly reservation costs. What ever happened to "keep it simple, stupid!" UNIX principle? From the article: " _We have to comply to a few regulations so we have a few dedicated options here and there. It’s 10% on top of the instance price (plus a $1500 fixed monthly fee per region)._ " ------ bdcravens "Paying guarantees a 24h SLA to get a reply to a limit ticket. The free tiers might have to wait for a week (maybe more), being unable to work in the meantime. It is an absurd yet very real reason pushing for premium support." Not my experience.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Lessons of the McAfee False Positive Fiasco - there http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363018,00.asp ====== hga Who tests the testers? According to Wikipedia, XP is the most widely used OS and SP3 shipped two years ago. It's pretty unforgivable not to test against this configuration, although as I read it XP SP3 most likely slipped through the cracks (and who knows what else) when they changed their testing setup rather than their deliberately just not testing against it at all. For a product where testing is so critical and there are so many configurations to test, it would make sense to automate the confirmation of the full test suite rather than depending on eyeballs. That's the sort of thing computers are good at, after all. ------ Mathnerd314 It's missing a lesson: don't use McAfee	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Roundup may cause half of all children to have autism by 2025 (2014) - maxwell https://healthimpactnews.com/2014/mit-researcher-glyphosate-herbicide-will-cause-half-of-all-children-to-have-autism-by-2025/ ====== jareds The link should be changed to the following. [https://www.snopes.com/fact- check/glyphosatan/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/glyphosatan/) ------ _Schizotypy Organic food actually causes autism, not glyphosate [https://us-east-1.tchyn.io/snopes-production/uploads/images/...](https://us- east-1.tchyn.io/snopes- production/uploads/images/graphics/news/autismcause.jpg) /s	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Performance in Factor, Java, and Clojure - prospero http://ideolalia.com/performance-in-clojure-and-factor ====== chrisduesing Clojure "beating" Java performance seems like an odd claim, since they both compile to the same thing. Doesn't that simply imply the approach/algorithm is better? ~~~ prospero The difference in performance is because the Clojure code is targeting the GPU rather than the CPU. This generally results in a faster, but more verbose solution (see this "hello world" in OpenCL: [http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Perform...](http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/OpenCL_MacProgGuide/Example:Hello,World/Example:Hello,World.html)). However, the defmap and defreduce macros in the snippet abstract away all that boilerplate, resulting in something that is both significantly faster than the standard approach, and significantly more concise. The Factor vs. Java benchmark seemed like a decent way to demonstrate that. ~~~ plinkplonk "The difference in performance is because the Clojure code is targeting the GPU rather than the CPU." In that case wouldn't a fairer comparison be between java code that targets the GPU and factor code that _also_ targets the GPU. Right now its seems that the only valid conclusions is code that targets the GPU is better than code that targets the CPU (for certain kinds of tasks). ~~~ prospero I mentioned in the post that it wasn't an apples to apples comparison. That being said, I think that ease of development is a more practical metric for comparison than the underlying methods. Clojure lends itself to translation into GLSL, which has useful vector functionality, so it ends up being simpler and more concise to target the GPU than it would be to write it in plain Clojure. You could certainly use the GPU in other languages and achieve equal or better performance, but in the vast majority of cases it would not be the path of least resistance. ~~~ plinkplonk " Clojure lends itself to translation into GLSL, " How so more than factor? Factor (like Forth) is just a set of words and it is easy to conceive of a GLSL vocabulary for it(I use "vocabulary" in the Forth/Factor sense). How is "10 sq 5 - ." (Factor/Forth) "less translatable" than "(- (square 10) 5)" [Clojure/lisp]? " You could certainly use the GPU in other languages and achieve equal or better performance, but in the vast majority of cases it would not be the path of least resistance." Well here we aren't talking of most cases ( :-) )but specifically Factor vs Clojure. I hope you take the time to explain why you think Clojure is superior to Factor in _this_ respect (if that is the point you were making). Comparing metrics of languages compiling to different chips make little sense. Comparing Clojure compiling to the GPU and Factor compiling to the CPU makes as much sense as comparing Clojure compiling to Intel and Factor comparing to something entirely different (say the ARM). Specific tasks will be faster on one or the other. So what? Two things differ(the language being compiled and the compiled to chip) making any "comparisons", at best dubious. ~~~ prospero As far as I understand it, Factor has a regular grammar and macros, so I don't see any reason why it couldn't do exactly what I've done here with Clojure. My comment above was referring more to Java, which is generally considered to be the apex of potential performance for Clojure, but which would completely incapable of something like this. I didn't mean to lump Factor and Java together, sorry for the imprecision. ~~~ plinkplonk "My comment above was referring more to Java, which is generally considered to be the apex of potential performance for Clojure, but which would completely incapable of something like this." Ok, No arguments then, if the expressiveness, succinctness and malleability of java vs Clojure were the point of comparison. Factor vs Clojure would be a dead heat I imagine. The original article makes the statement " That's 4x faster than the optimized Factor code, and more than 10x faster than Java." I was saying _this_ comparison is not only meaningless but misleading. The statements should be something like "The Clojure code (which compiles to the GPU) is 4x faster than the optimized Factor code (which compiles to the CPU) , and more than 10x faster than Java(which compiles to the CPU). GPUs and CPUs make different speed tradeoffs so the above is meaningless btw " For language speed comparisons to be (somewhat) meaningful, they should have a common baseline environment. If each language compiles to a different type of chip (GPU vs CPU in this case) there is no valid "comparison". ------ yangyang Misleading title - it should definitely include the fact that the clojure implementation was GPU based. ------ itistoday Wondering if maybe someone familiar with penumbra could explain to me why on earth they chose to go with JOGL instead of LWJGL. Doesn't the latter have far more activity going on with it? ~~~ prospero I chose the one that seemed closer to vanilla OpenGL, because that's all I really wanted. I don't claim to be an expert, though. What would LWJGL give me that JOGL doesn't? ~~~ itistoday I'm not an expert either, but a while back I spent over a year looking into the whole Java OpenGL gaming thing. I started out working with the Xith3D library and made some contributions to it, but soon it became painfully clear that the best 3D library for Java was jMonkeyEngine, and it used lwjgl. Looking further into it I think I found that JOGL seemed to be a somewhat abandoned project (sortof like Java3D), and that the real action was with LWJGL/jMonkeyEngine. Both had a far larger and more active community, and LWJGL supported more OpenGL features, and LWJGL may have been faster than JOGL too, although again, you're bringing up a fairly old memories, so I can't say they're perfectly accurate, I may in fact be spewing nonsense. I'd say take a look at both and compare. ~~~ prospero Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into it further. The code that binds Penumbra to JOGL is pretty small, so it would be easy to swap something else in if it seems clearly superior. ~~~ itistoday Great! Thanks for considering it, and if it's that easy then Penumbra would be even more appealing for supporting both. I'm hoping to get back into the Java world through Clojure, so I'm very happy to see that a project like Penumbra is there! ~~~ pmjordan From what I can tell, JOGL is preferable in at least one situation: Applets. Since the code is signed by Sun, it's a lot less hassle to run it in a browser than if you had to get hold of signatures yourself. Might be something worth bearing in mind.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet "Ginger" (2003) - hboon http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3533.html ====== xefer I get the same feeling about Google Glass that I got from Segway: cool technology, but who the heck is going to actually use it? ~~~ sajid I never understood what problem the Segway was supposed to solve. Same with Glass. ~~~ InclinedPlane Segway was based on cutting edge technology and it worked really well. Indeed, it was impressive in its capabilities. But mostly out of novelty. In terms of basic capabilities it was a stinker. Compare it to a moped: much slower, much shorter range, can't carry a passenger, can't carry cargo, can't travel on roadways, much more expensive. Compare it to a bicycle: slower, much shorter range, can't carry cargo, can't travel on roadways, very much more expensive, can't be used for exercise, going up hills is easier. Compare it to a car: enormously slower, vastly shorter range, can't carry cargo, can't travel on roadways, exposed to the elements, potentially comparable cost. Compare it to walking: saves some time and effort especially on hills, less convenient, borderline rude to use near other pedestrians, avoids extremely low impact exercise, still exposed to the elements, very high cost. And there you have it. For the vast majority of situations using a Segway is actually a huge downgrade from an equivalent expenditure. For the cost of a Segway you could buy a used car, or a moped, or an extremely nice bicycle. Meanwhile, if you have a commute that you would be willing to use a Segway for it would generally be absolutely superior to simply walk or bike and get some exercise in the process. ~~~ glenra Though there are a few uses where it's the best tool for the job. For instance, taking a "Segway Tour" of an unfamiliar city such as Austin. It's like a walking tour in that you can experience the local geography of the place and see everything close up but everyone can cover more ground more quickly and nobody has to fall behind or slow up the group because they're a slow walker. Plus, it's just _fun_ to ride. ~~~ weirdcat More than once I saw them being used in video productions, with a steadicam guy riding one. ------ mmahemoff The article's from 2003, but the hype began sometime around 2000 and it was revealed in 2001. This and Transmeta were these two ultra-secret projects at the time, with big names, a lot of speculation, and no accurate leaks until they were officially unveiled. Neither really panned out. ~~~ InclinedPlane I always thought Transmeta's code morphing technology was really cool but it never really had a chance to mature and the patents kept other folks from looking at the idea. ------ breakall Jobs' harsh criticism reminded me instantly of the 2003 email from Bill Gates trashing Windows Movie Maker, the Microsoft.com website, etc. [1] It also reminded me of presentations I've given that have "gotten out of hand". I've found it's nearly impossible to direct a meeting like that--smart, intense people will not be led along the carefully crafted golden path you lay out for their time. In Tim Adams' shoes, you may find yourself frustrated answering interruptive questions that are answered clearly in your deck, spec document, etc. After much experience with this, I've found that if you can give a sensible answer to the question, and after the answer is accepted, just say "... and that's in the document on page X", people are generally pleased with that. If they point out a loophole, gap, etc. in your design, "we will call that out" or "we'll add that immediately" can get you moving along again. The "did you read the entire deck" question was funny. (Could that possibly work?? :-P) [1] [http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text- an-...](http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-epic-bill- gates-e-mail-rant/) ~~~ ChuckMcM I find smart people like to work that way, read the deck first then talk about the 2 or three key things that everything else hinges on. Saves time. ------ Hitchhiker An interesting thought experiment to do.. get really smart friends to read this piece after stripping Harvard , Bezos, Jobs and almost all the names .. replace them with variables X_1,X_2 etc.. perhaps a good thing to do for almost all such pieces. ~~~ mmcconnell1618 I've always thought a political news web site that stripped out names/parties would be interesting too. When you don't have a bias for/against the speaker you may find you are more open to ideas. ------ maked00 Just goes to show the kings new clothes can fool the 1%.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Patch for critical privilege escalation flaw in Kubernetes - rapathak https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/kubernetes-announce/GVllWCg6L88 ====== coleca Shame they aren't updating anything older than 1.10. 1.09 was released just a year ago. The commercial K8S vendors seem to be doing the patch all the way back. Smart move by them to signal to the enterprise the value of using a commercially supported K8S distribution over something like kops or kubeadm. ~~~ zegl Kubernetes has a hard time defining itself sometimes, this behavior makes sense if you think of Kubernetes as a kernel. You either run directly on the kernel, or use a OS that adds features and LTS support to it. I know however that there is a LTS-SIG that’s trying to figure out what Kubernetes is, and for how long old releases should be supported. ------ bostonvaulter2 I don't really understand the fix: [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/71412/files](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/71412/files) I was expecting something that altered more rather than a bunch of length checks. But I guess that's how security is sometimes. ------ merb hm, so only people are affected that gave users access to specific permissions that are not supposed to do everything. we only allow cluster access to people that needed cluster-admin rights anyway.. for anybody else, we abstract k8s away. ~~~ web007 [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/71411](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/71411) for more details, which includes: In default configurations, all users (authenticated and unauthenticated) are allowed to perform discovery API calls that allow this escalation.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
[Update] Warn HN: How to accidentally, irreversibly nuke your Facebook account - jpadvo Yesterday afternoon I posted about the disaster that happened to my Facebook account: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2256150<p>Someone at Facebook responded extremely quickly -- yesterday evening they updated documentation (a blog post) to prevent others from accidentally doing this, and when I woke up this morning my account was completely restored.<p>Thank you whoever at Facebook reads HN and fixed this for me. :)<p>However, other developers still have broken accounts because of this issue. I hope that it can be fixed for them, too.<p>http://www.skybondsor.com/blog/undo-test-account-on-facebook<p>http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=90196<p>http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=89194<p>http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=88696<p>http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=85580<p>http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=75057 ====== santoshsah4 Hi i am facing the same problem.Now all i have is just profile image and nothing more.I tried to leave the network but it shows you arenot connected to any network.can some one help me? i m completely lost..... ------ tuneupsanjeev When did that happen to you account? and how was ur account restored?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
When Will the Last Line of Code Be Written? - josh_carterPDX http://blog.brightwork.io/when-will-the-last-ever-line-of-code-be-written/ ====== RyanCavanaugh As systems evolve into higher levels of abstraction, things that we used to consider to be "code" become "data" instead. For example, in 1950, you would write a lot of code to accomplish what you can do today with a pivot table in Excel (which we don't consider to be "coding"). Page layout you'd write as code in 1996 is now "data" encoded in CSS. At the same time, things that used to be major code concerns have been abstracted into the underlying systems. Garbage collection, privilege separation, caching, and so on continue to move lower in the stack. The trend toward programming languages that more natively support asynchronicity is another great example. The better question to ask is: What tasks that we accomplish with code today will be accomplished with data tomorrow? ~~~ buzzybee There's a cautionary aspect to this in that simply adding parameters and making configuration data(e.g. much of the Java XML ecosystem) is not enough to squash out "coding". It takes some carefully thought abstraction to make a difference. In some places we've made progress, in others we've churned through tech without going forward. ~~~ collyw It moving from imperative to declarative programming essentially. ------ moftz I don't believe the author even writes code, he is just a liaison between the developers and management. He's only seeing the big picture, none of the actual work involved with creating low level libraries, drivers, etc. You can't really just point and click something like snapchat or facebook into existence. ~~~ josh_carterPDX You should probably look up Adam DuVander. He's a well respected Developer Evangelist who helped Sendgrid grow their community. ~~~ gaius But not an engineer? ~~~ duvander I have a computer science degree and I love to write code. My title does not have "engineer" in it. Feel free to hold that against me :) ------ jcadam The topic of this post reminds me of the state of 'programming' in the distant future described in the novel "A Deepness in the Sky" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky)): From the article: > "The Qeng Ho's computer and timekeeping systems feature the advent of > "programmer archaeologists": the Qeng Ho are packrats of computer programs > and systems, retaining them over millennia, even as far back to the era of > Unix programs (as implied by one passage mentioning that the fundamental > time-keeping system is the Unix epoch)." ------ warmwaffles Never. People like to build things. Just like asking, when will the last muzzle loader be made? Simple answer, never. People love hobbies. ~~~ stevenwiles This. It's exactly like self-driving cars. I hope it NEVER becomes illegal to drive on public roads, even when there are self-driving cars. No one can ever take the freedom of driving away from me. I love driving and I will never stop doing it. Just like coding. ~~~ dota_fanatic But you're not free to code on publicly available software (the production instance) just because you want to. I'm guessing driving on public roads will become illegal for safety and efficiency reasons once automated driving takes over. I bet you'll be able to go to a closed course and drive there though, for a cost. :) ~~~ stevenwiles I'm not sure why you are in favor of the government taking away our basic freedoms, but I do not agree with you, sir. If you want to live in a fascist country, you are more than welcome to move to one. :) ~~~ Thimothy As self-driving highways, with cars that move at 250 km/h (155 mph), become common, regular driving will probably be restricted to secondary roads first, tertiary later. As time goes by, you will be seen as a nuisance from most of the drivers, as your car will be restricted to driving 60 km/h (37 mph) less than the rest in the same kind of road. So by the time a law passes that forbids non-autonomous driving, it won't be a "fascist government" but your own countrymen who will take your "basic freedom" away. But don't worry, I was using the "you" figuratively, by the time this happens, I don't think any of us will be alive. And, of course, there is always the off-chance that someone codifies in the constitution the right to drive a car, assuring that future generations have the freedom to kill themselves in the roads as we proudly do today. ~~~ gwbas1c I don't think that will ever happen. We'll all be traveling via self-driving drones instead! The roads will just be for hobbyists who like to drive their own cars (and write their own code,) and probably transportation of heavy materials. ------ westoncb The fundamental thing we're doing when writing code is specifying computations. The difficulty of it comes from the fact that when we conceive of some computation we'd like executed, we do so with human brains, whereas the thing that's going to execute the computation is a totally different kind of thing: they each have something like their own 'internal format' for representing program concepts. Our strategy has been to write stacks of translators to bring the machine's internal format nearer to our own. The last line of code will be written when we develop translators for languages near enough to our own internal representations that we no longer require special training to learn the machine's representation. It won't make sense to call it 'code' anymore. This kindred language/representation may be natural language (and maybe not), but if it were I'd imagine there'd have to be a tight feedback loop in the machine's attempts to sort out ambiguities in a developer's specification. So, programming would turn into a conversation with a computer: you ask for something, it proposes a solution ("Thanks John! How's this?"—it'll probably be like that. Ugh.), you express your modifications, it proposes another solution etc. That's my guess anyway. ~~~ foota That kind of reminds me of the computer in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress ~~~ Jtsummers Using loglan[0] as the primary language of interaction. Addressing the issue (in theory) of ambiguity in other human-oriented languages. [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan) ------ thallukrish Unless there is a compelling reason I never felt comfortable using frameworks. They tend to make a small problem much bigger. You end up spending time understanding, fixing and adjusting to the framework than making that little adjustment to your code to extend the functionality or relook at your needs. ~~~ red_blobs This works for small projects that only you touch. However, if you are building a product for a company and plan on having teams make changes to the code base, frameworks are the way to go. It's even easier when hiring because a big portion of your training is already done before the person is hired and they are knowledgeable in said framework. ~~~ gwbas1c I've found that the bigger problems are: \- Confusing design patterns with frameworks \- Using frameworks incorrectly \- Using a framework when a library is more appropriate For example, Dependency Injection should start as a design pattern, and then a framework brought in based on the project's requirements. A couple of screens of "new" statements have very little learning overhead. No framework can define the way an application's modules relate with each other. ------ rajington FizzBuzz on a whiteboard for an interview at the top AI firm: Gopplezonsoft in 2048 ------ js8 Maybe in the far future, all the computer code will become encoded in lambda calculus, and immediately matched and refactored against huge database of existing lambda abstractions. So the code will not be written anymore, it will only be rediscovered as a combination of already existing abstractions. ~~~ smaddox If you posit the conceptual existence of such a database, then all we really do when we code, even today, is choose a particular set of abstractions to implement a specification. It would be certainly be nice if existing languages/analyzers were capable of suggesting "better" abstractions, though, for whatever operational definition of "better" applies at the time (e.g. more compact or common or efficient). ------ heurist When will the last painting be painted? ------ gliderShip Reminds me of [Why I Hate Frameworks] [http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel.3.219431.12](http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel.3.219431.12) ------ forty I have not read the article yet but the title reminds me of this [http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/11/13/the-last-ever- line-...](http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/11/13/the-last-ever-line-of- code/) ------ tlextrait It's not because we achieve more with less code that we write less code. Instead we want more. Doing speech recognition would have been unthinkable with punch cards... plenty of things are still unthinkable today, but maybe not tomorrow. ~~~ marcosdumay > It's not because we achieve more with less code that we write less code. > Instead we want more. It's inevitable that this changes some day. Probably a very distant day, but we must get to the point when we solved nearly half of all the problems that we can solve with software. ------ kapv89 I'd like to share something I wrote in response of seeing too many posts like this: [https://medium.com/@kapv89/code-will-always-be- written-207d3...](https://medium.com/@kapv89/code-will-always-be- written-207d3cdfe145#.6snta46s8) \- Code will always be Written ------ stevofolife Who cares... Not trying to be harsh here but seriously why is this on HN? Moreover the article is too brief to discuss meaningfully a nodus like this. ------ peter-m80 tl;dr "Will the last line of code ever be written? Probably not" ~~~ jsprogrammer Did the article rule out a "doomsday line"? ------ jcwayne About 5 minutes before attempting to open the first trans-multiverse wormhole. ------ simbalion probably around the same time as the last stupid blog post. maybe shortly after.. :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
.in ccTLD domain name list - over 600k domains listed - hughesey http://viewdns.info/data/?yin ====== sp332 So?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Fed is Now Pumping $200 Billion Per Month - chailatte http://www.businessinsider.com/the-fed-is-now-pumping-200-billion-per-month-2011-4 ====== tnt128 I have trouble understanding the term 'adjusted US Monetary Base', is it m0, m1, or m2?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Sharethebus becomes Bus.com and raises $5M for event shuttle management - mstats https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/05/sharethebus-becomes-bus-com-and-raises-5m-for-event-shuttle-management/ ====== loceng I personally feel they should keep the sharethebus.com brand. The opening of the TechCrunch article states "It’s actually a pretty great URL: Bus.com. It’s also a much better brand identity than Sharethebus ..." \- however they don't say why it is a much better brand identity. Simply being a 3-letter domain doesn't make for a better brand identity. They have traction and funding, so it they may not see much of an impact because it is still a utility... but how would you react to seeing a promotion relating to a festival talking about "Bus.com" or "Sharethebus.com" \- which one gives you a feeling of something more than a utility? ~~~ icantdrive55 After the free expose on HN, I like the three letter domain. Didn't know a bit about the company until now. I do wonder what they paid for the domain? I could almost picture the negotiations, 'Hay--because of Google, the price of three letter domains just arn't worth what they once were. So--here's--$50,000?'. I love the picture in the article. So wholesome. Where I live, these busses are rented out by rich kids. They party heavily on them. Which is better than the way I partied. Driving around with a jug of wine on the back of a mustang that didn't have a front bumper, nor grill. I just got lucky so many Friday nights. ~~~ kysebo haha - yes, our service is generally pretty wholesome. Sounds like you had an interesting experience with buses growing up. Where were you raised? Certainly, the value of the domain was part of the conversation, but generally domain brokers still push the value of TLDs like this (obviously to their benefit). ------ kysebo Hey guys, I'm one of two founders of Bus.com. Thanks for discussing our service. I'm happy to answer any questions. ------ bhahn > Bus.com is the destination you’d expect to head to for what the company > does... Is the writing quality of techcrunch articles normally this poor? ~~~ stagbeetle TechCrunch is pop-tech. The majority of articles (maybe even all of them) are short and easy to digest. ------ notliketherest 1620 per bus day from Palo Alto to Napa. That is so expensive! ~~~ jdavis703 Same, mine came to about $900/seat. I'm assuming this service must be targeted to short-haul routes (e.g. a parking lot a few miles away from your own event at a parking constrained location). They really should explain what exactly costs so much in the quote and perhaps not even show such high rates and explain they need to contact you in person. ~~~ kysebo Hey! Something about this doesn't seem right. I checked our system and couldn't find anything resembling this. I'd be happy to look into it if you can provide me with more info.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google gets patent for software that can identify any object on the planet - rohit89 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2195722/Indexing-world-Google-receives-software-means-intelligently-identify-object-planet.html ====== dragonbonheur In how many ways can someone implement a multi-layer perceptron or other types of classifier neural networks? Patents nowadays...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How did you get past the analysis paralysis for startup ideas? - gyani95 A few friends and I have been talking about doing a startup as far as I can remember. After University all of us took jobs and now we feel fairly comfortable to start a business/something on the side. Only problem : Can't decide on an idea.<p>We create spread sheets and Google docs of ideas but can't zero in on anything. In University we would hack on anything and release it. I feel we are romanticizing the perfect idea too much.<p>Are we using ideas as an excuse to not start something?<p>Should we randomly hack on things that we like?<p>How did you get past your stage of analysis paralysis?<p>Some advice, I have received is to not look for ideas but to solve problems that you see in this world. How do you pick what problem you'll be spending the next few years on?<p>How did you find your idea? ====== madamelic >Are we using ideas as an excuse to not start something? Yes >Should we randomly hack on things that we like? Yes >How did you get past your stage of analysis paralysis? Start building something I love >How do you pick what problem you'll be spending the next few years on? Don't. It is far too hard to predict what is and isn't going to be a hit. If you really hate something, it'd be really dumb of you to pursue it just because you think you'll make money. Build something you are passionate about. I just keep a Trello list of any idea I have. I don't prejudge. I put ideas on there even if I think they're dumb because some day they might stop being or might morph into something else. ~~~ gyani95 How do you pick what to work on from your Trello list? ~~~ madamelic Some kind of combination of what is currently feasible (I have the space to work on it), interesting to work on and occasionally, has the potential to be monetized. I sometimes work on stuff that don't have a clear monetization path. Generally those turn into experiments that I can feed the lessons into easier to monetize projects. ------ saluki Most profitable ideas are something that solves a problem you or one of your founders and who's customers would be businesses or individuals who could save/make money using your service in their own business. For Inspiration Checkout the businesses on indiehackers. Listen to their podcast too. [https://www.indiehackers.com/products](https://www.indiehackers.com/products) Good Advice - DHH Startup School [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY) Listen to the archive starting at episode 1 Rob goes from drop shipping beach towels and jobs websites through a couple successful software products to founding and exiting with Drip. [http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/archives](http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/archives)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Social commerce with a hyper-local spin. www.reppio.com - man_bear_pig It's my first startup to launch. Would love to get HN's feedback.<p>www.reppio.com ====== LA_livin112 love this idea- it is a hard one to execute. i like the direction that you took with this though- giving each of the cities a way to be distinct from each other. are you planning to expand past these cities? going abroad for like london or toyko? going through (a great great design)it sticks out from others in the local space because of the focus on the individual store and how it fits in wit he the larger community. i think these are key to being able to create a marketplace in the local. will there be a way to directly message or keep up to date with the shops that i like? ------ retroafroman Do you have a demo account we can use to login, or is sign up necessary? ~~~ man_bear_pig if you really want... i made it just for today and rest of weekend - you can put in an email address (you don't have to actually confirm) to reduce friction to get feedback from you guys. would be great if you could actually sign up because you like the platform but if that's a hassle for you then there's your answer : ) ------ amd58198 like the local angel. def lots of players trying for it, you guys seem to have captured it. nice design too ~~~ man_bear_pig thanks for the feedback! i designed it using microsoft powerpoint. haha. (i have no design background so getting feedback on ui/ux would be super helpful).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Europe’s Economic Suicide - motti_s http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/opinion/krugman-europes-economic-suicide.html?_r=2 ====== dimitar Yes! A Paul Krugman column. I think its worthwhile for anyone to try to understand his economic assertions on the crisis. The most important part is understanding what is aggregate demand and what things like interest rates tell us. Actually might change your worldview. For example that sometimes individually rational behavior (deleveraging instead of investing in a crisis) can be disastrous for the economy as a whole. ------ VeejayRampay Yes please Mr Krugman ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman#Economics_and_poli...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman#Economics_and_policy_recommendations)), enlighten us idiotic European people about the ins and outs of proper economic management. The American economy is doing so well too... The nerve on this dude, amazing.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Polyisocyanurate#Fire_risk - delhanty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyisocyanurate#Fire_risk ====== delhanty I submitted this in relation to the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower, London 2 days ago. Also relevant is the article referenced by Wikipedia: [http://www.probyn-miers.com/perspective/2016/02/fire- risks-f...](http://www.probyn-miers.com/perspective/2016/02/fire-risks-from- external-cladding-panels-perspective-from-the-uk/) Edit: more specifically I was interested in the following. In the relevant article it states: >The most common forms of insulation cores for composite panels in use in the UK at the end of the 20th century, in order of decreasing probability of fire propagation, [4] were: >polystyrene (EPS), >polyurethane (PUR), >polyisocyanurate (PIR), >phenolic, >mineral fibre. And then: >PIR, a variant of PUR having improved fire properties, is difficult to ignite and exhibits a pronounced charring which enables it to withstand fire for longer, but is ultimately combustible. OK - so PIR "is ultimately combustible". But then there is also the convection effect of cavities: >If flames become confined or restricted by entering cavities within the external cladding system, they will become elongated as they seek oxygen and fuel to support the combustion process. This process can lead to flame extension of five to ten times that of the original flame lengths, regardless of the materials used to line the cavities. So maybe what is needed is an sufficiently hot trigger - e.g. an exploding fridge or tumbler drier - and a PIR clad tower block like Grenfell Tower can become an inferno. Unfortunately, it seems that all this was known and understood by the fire authorities in the UK and that they had been communicating it to government for years, but nothing was done. ------ PaulHoule People often aren't aware of the fire dangers of plastics. If you get a chance you might see a demo from your local fire department of how quickly a synthetic fiber couch will burn up and fill a room with smoke. Have a few beers, smoke in bed and you can die from the fumes just like that.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
W/ Fedoracoin: Dedicated payment platform for Fedoracoin restores faith in coin - withfedoraco_in https://pay.withfedoraco.in/ ====== theklub Join us on drevil.com and discuss your app!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Henrietta Lacks - i_feel_great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks ====== i_feel_great I have worked with the HeLa cell line, but I never knew where it came from or what HeLa stood for.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The (dis)information mercenaries now controlling Trump’s databases - mxfh https://medium.com/@pdehaye/the-dis-information-mercenaries-now-controlling-trumps-databases-4f6a20d4f3e7#.nqbrob3xs ====== Lintaris They expand from having third-world customers to having first-world customers.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Alexa Voice Service Integration for AWS IoT Core - nonbirithm https://aws.amazon.com/jp/blogs/iot/introducing-alexa-voice-service-integration-for-aws-iot-core/ ====== tlrobinson Somewhat related project I came across recently, Almond "The Open, Privacy- Preserving Virtual Assistant": [https://almond.stanford.edu/](https://almond.stanford.edu/) ~~~ dang Discussed once in 2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17532003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17532003). But you should repost it! ------ danw1979 If this is targeted at low power microcontrollers, I don't understand how the devices are supposed to recognise the attention word ("Alexa" by default in Echo devices) and filter out unwanted chatter. Our maybe doing that filtering is cheaper than I expect it to be ? If Alexa ends up in many devices in the same room, which one am I addressing when I use the attention word ? Are we going to have many different attention words for different devices ?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Jeff Bezos on the Founding of Amazon (1998) - _pius http://web.archive.org/web/20081120140522/http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/98/98-07bezos-speech.html ====== mdaniel What an interesting coincidence, the Now I Know newsletter this morning was about a neat Bezos story and contained a link to this talk: [http://nowiknow.com/the-lichen-loophole/](http://nowiknow.com/the-lichen- loophole/) ~~~ _pius No coincidence at all. ;)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil - blasdel http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabdc0.html ====== wglb Great story, particularly in regard to the balance required to make the whole thing work, and to push the oil companies to innovate. It also brings to mind the essay "There are no Mom and Pop Oil Companies in Norway": [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b3b24fb751...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b3b24fb7512f220f) ------ jakewolf I love people who fearlessly operate like this: "After the Ekofisk find, he had to train new recruits. “I, of course, accepted that I am teaching people so that they can make my existence unnecessary … What choice did I have? I had only one hope, and that is that through my contribution, I would become indispensable, which I did.”" ------ terpua “Not everything in life has been good – but things have mostly come in a fortunate order. It’s got nothing to do with skill, it’s simply luck. Like the idea to drop by the Department of Industry … it was just because I am the kind of person who hates waiting.” Most successful people contribute their success to luck - maybe that's why they are so lucky. ~~~ lsc Many successful people, when trying to be modest or polite will attribute much of their success to luck. How much of that is modesty? I don't know, but in this case, the guy is clearly being humble and letting the reporter talk him up. ------ einarvollset Immigrants. What a nefarious source of evil to be scorned. ~~~ numair There's a massive difference between the emigration of a very smart, talented person who is eager to assimilate and contribute to society, and immigration involving large numbers of people who are unskilled and have no intention of becoming part of mainstream society in your country. (And I say this as an immigrant) ~~~ michael_dorfman I'm also an immigrant (to Norway, actually), and I can tell you that it's quite difficult in practice to tell the difference-- it's not nearly as "massive" as you think. ~~~ numair I was in Oslo last week - there's large parts of town where it's quite easy to tell the difference. Anyway, this isn't the right forum for this discussion... ~~~ laut I read in a Norwegian newspaper that a part of Oslo "Grønland", there was a guy who thought that Norwegians should follow certain muslim norms because it's a muslim neighborhood. This was in response to some people that had been assaulted in the neighborhood. ------ bjelkeman-again From the article: "It’s got nothing to do with skill, it’s simply luck. Like the idea to drop by the Department of Industry … it was just because I am the kind of person who hates waiting.” IMHO people often attribute to luck what is in fact created by themselves. On another note, Norway's oil production is now in sharp decline: [http://www.norway.org/NR/rdonlyres/3AE52C92-D215-419D-8131-9...](http://www.norway.org/NR/rdonlyres/3AE52C92-D215-419D-8131-9A5A13FB1ACA/49868/productionncs1.gif) [http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/a-decline-rate- stud...](http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/a-decline-rate-study-of- norwegian-oil-production/) ------ miked _Olsen gives al-Kasim much of the credit: he pushed the government to increase extraction rates; insisted that companies try new technologies, such as water injection in chalk reservoirs or horizontal drilling; and threatened to withdraw operating licences from companies that balked. “It is this culture, a culture of ‘squeezing the last drop out’, which he cultivated,” says Olsen._ As it stands, this makes no sense. If a cost-benefit analysis showed that investing in technology to increase extraction efficiencies would pay off (given the volatitlty of future prices, etc.), then it should have been done regardless of his urgings. If it didn't, he should never have pushed the idea. In the first case, StatOil would need new managers. In the second, the subject of the story would be wrong. You'd think that the editors of _The Financial Times_ would have pursued that issue in a bit more depth. ~~~ furyg3 Pay off now, or pay off later? The incentive structure for a CEO or other executive at a large multi-national oil firm is likely such that he/she would much rather have a lot of oil drilled in the short-term, rather than a smaller ammount of oil in the short- term and a larger total ammount over the long-term. The same goes for the board members and investors. "Long-term" here is _decades_ , possibly _generations_ , not next quarter. That means that a large chunk of the profits may be realized well after you're retired (or dead), which is not so great for your bonus structure, promotion schedule, or the ROI timeframes that most investors are concerned with (but fantastic for a nation-state). Furthermore contract structures over that kind of timeframe become a bit unpredictable, especially contracts with a sovreign nation, so better to get what you can now and get out. This kind of long-term thinking is where corporations fall short. Even if it's the best interests of the 'corporation' to invest in the long term (which clearly ended up being the case here), it's not in the best interests of the individuals working there. Very few institutions are capable of that mode of operation (nations, monarchies/family dynasties). ~~~ miked While I largely agree on most of your points, I think there's a porblem with this: _The incentive structure for a CEO or other executive at a large multi- national oil firm is likely such that he/she would much rather have a lot of oil drilled in the short-term, rather than a smaller ammount of oil in the short-term and a larger total ammount over the long-term._ That seems to me a bit of a strawman, though I confess I know little about how the oil business works. The issue here comes down to a present value calculation for proposed investments. You seem to be implying that the Iraqi engineer pushed for short-term maximization thru the use of new technologies. But those technologies cost money, _now_. That would reduce the company's profit and (if he's a shareholder) his (short-term) return. ~~~ Estragon I confess I know little about how the oil business works So basically you're arguing from the axioms of free-market fundamentalism. \ _yawn\_ ~~~ anamax > So basically you're arguing from the axioms of free-market fundamentalism. Since he was responding to an argument with even less basis, it's curious that only the response rated the above comment. ------ fhars All I get from that link is a page not found error. Has the article been pulled, or have ft.com tried and failed to provide a mobile version of their site? Or are they just filtering access to that page from norway where the servers serving opera mini seem to be located, judging from the mislocalized adsense stuff google tends to show me?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Little Stories Told with Numbers - hypertexthero https://github.com/postlight/account ====== hypertexthero My favorite line in the documentation: > Paragraphs were a wasteful orthographic indulgence by lazy monks and we > don’t allow them here.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive - Amorymeltzer http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/hgst-releases-helium-filled-10tb-hard-drive-seagate-twiddles-shingled-fingers/ ====== rsync As a provider of cloud storage (who actually owns the infrastructure) this is both exciting and frustrating... Exciting because we love the idea of deploying a 450TB zpool in a 4U chassis ... Frustrating because we will have to keep reworking our price per GB. With that in mind, our new attic/borg[1] support has dropped down to 3 cents per GB, per month to kind-of-sort-of match S3 pricing[2]. [1] [http://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail- backups/](http://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/) [2] [http://www.rsync.net/products/attic.html](http://www.rsync.net/products/attic.html) ~~~ JungleGymSam > If you're not sure what this means, our product is Not For You. Hey, thanks! I stopped reading there. :) ~~~ rsync We both win! ~~~ PhantomGremlin I agree with this. However, it would be nice to know a little about the company. I perused your website, but didn't see any pages about the company history and current employees. Did I miss that? I did finally see the "CEO page", but it doesn't seem to be linked from the main page. It also appears to be something a technical person _shows_ their CEO, rather than something that is _about_ the CEO of rsync.net. I also didn't even see a physical address displayed anywhere. Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't feel comfortable dealing with such a black box business situation. Perhaps you need to add a second disclaimer? If you want to know who you're doing business with, our product is Not for You. ~~~ rsync We just redesigned our website and I guess our old "about" page didn't make it in the redeploy. FWIW, I'm John Kozubik, owner and founder, and we started offering this service in 2001 as an add-on to JohnCompanies colocation (the first VPS provider)[1][2]. We spun rsync.net out as a standalone entity in 2006. Address is 524 San Anselmo Ave., Suite 107, San Anselmo, CA 94960. Although data is housed in either San Diego, Fremont, Denver, Zurich or Hong Kong datacenters. [1] Yes, really. [2] We called them "server instances" \- someone else coined "VPS" and it stuck. ------ miahi The great thing is that it doesn't use SMR. I have an 8TB SMR from Seagate and its write performance is bad and variable, much like the pre-TRIM SSDs. It's ok if you write a lot of stuff and then just read it (you can get >100MB/s out of it), but I often see small random writes (updates) at 3-4 IOPS, because it has to re-shingle the whole track. ~~~ praseodym They're also terrible in RAID environments: [http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb](http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb) ------ sageabilly I wonder if these will be recoverable by traditional data recovery means, or if opening them and exposing the platters to normal air instead of helium would mean they can't spin/run correctly. If helium-filled HDD technology becomes more widespread I am curious about the potential impact to the data recovery market. ~~~ lallysingh You could always open them in a larger helium chamber. ~~~ sageabilly Which would add a significant up-front cost that would have to be shouldered by the data recovery company. Potentially an issue for small shops (which most data recovery companies are.) ~~~ samstave Get one of those vacuum sealing luggage bags, cut holes in side and glue in some rubber gloves into these holes. Put drive and tools in. Vacuum seal it, then Fill with helium you get from the party store. Wear gloves, pickup tools and dismantle drive. ~~~ dogma1138 Or just buy a biosaftey glovebox they start around the 2000$ mark [http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nuaire-NU-704-300-Biological- Isolati...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nuaire-NU-704-300-Biological-Isolation- Safety-Cabinet-3-Glove- Box-/141559481390?hash=item20f59a442e:g:8tMAAOSw0e9UzACN) And pressurize it with helium or a noble gas. ------ TheOtherHobbes How well have the first generations of helium drives lasted? I'm wary of trusting my data to something that relies on incredibly good gas seals. But if there are no observed reliability issues, it seems that problem has been solved. ~~~ dangrossman They come with a 5 year warranty and 2.5M hours MTBF rating, which says something about the manufacturer's opinion of their reliability. ~~~ chefkoch That hasn't really helped the 3TB seagate constellation drives... ~~~ davidandgoliath Seagate has really gone downhill in that respect, though it's worth noting their enterprise grade stuff is still reasonable (ymmv). ~~~ hga You mean their almost certainly doomed by flash drive 10K and 15K drives? (A class of drive I've been using since 1995 and just stopped buying new ones; in fact, a 15K Savio mirrored system disk recently failed and I replaced both with an Intel enterprise SSD rather than send it in for warranty repair. So far I'm not looking back.) Officially, Constellation drives are "Enterprise", 5 year warranty (which still works well, did that on a 2TB drive last year I think), available in SAS as well as SATA interfaces. Although they're now saying that you shouldn't transfer more than 550TB of data per year through the best of this class of drives. ~~~ chefkoch In a 8 disk nas i replaced 6 oft them in one year because of bad smart data. Some lastet only Werks before marked as faulty. This series is really bad. ------ rusbus Can someone comment as to why it needs to be filled with helium? ~~~ pinewurst Lower air resistance/friction and lower turbulence for the heads. ~~~ ishansharma So, what will happen if it leaks? Will it just get slow or stop working? ~~~ thrownaway2424 It will probably stop working. Aerodynamics are crucial to the way a hard disk works. One cannot not simply increase the density of the gas inside the drive by 10x and expect it to continue working. ------ ck2 Isn't helium guaranteed to leak out over time because of the tiny atom size, giving these drives a most certain scheduled death? ~~~ ScottBurson "Guaranteed" is too strong a word, but I'm sure that engineering a seal that would hold reliably for years and could be mass-produced was a nontrivial problem. This is why everyone isn't already using helium. ------ jjcm I think these are gonna be too little too late for the platter drive market, especially with SSD capacities skyrocketing recently (thank you 3D NAND). Toshiba and Samsung both have announced plans for 128TB SSDs within the next 3 years - I can't really see platter drives competing with that. ------ fapjacks Great. One more drain on our Helium supply. ~~~ danieltillett Better than party balloons. Where is the hedge fund investing in long term storage of helium? ~~~ garblegarble I thought that was the problem with helium, it's hard to store because it leaks through everything so easily ~~~ danieltillett The USG had/has a store the National Helium Reserve [1]. It was being sold off so I am unsure how much is still in it, but to answer your question you store it underground. Edit. It looks that the National Helium reserve will be sold off by 2018 [2]. 1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve) 2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_production_in_the_Unite...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_production_in_the_United_States) ~~~ garblegarble Fascinating, thanks for the detail!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Religious Believers Are Nicer Say Researchers - nreece http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/gods-truth-believers-are-nicer-20110908-1jzrl.html ====== getonit It's easy to be nice when the world you live in is warm and fluffy.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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