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Regularly skipping breakfast linked to increased risk of heart disease - open-source-ux https://www.nhs.uk/news/food-and-diet/regularly-skipping-breakfast-linked-increased-risk-heart-disease-and-stroke/ ====== Starknaked I'd like to know how this factors into intermittent fasting as most people that do it just skip breakfast. ------ ohiovr Eating sausage, eggs, cheese, and bacon will kill you but its better than dying from not eating it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Green tea and Spirulina inhibit SARS-2 spike pseudotyped virus entry in vitro - abhayhegde https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.20.162701v1 ====== abhayhegde Further studies are required to understand the exact mechanism of viral inhibition. In summary, they have demonstrated that pseudo-typed virus is an ideal tool for screening viral entry inhibitors. Moreover, Spirulina and green tea could be promising antiviral agents against emerging viruses. Note: This article is not peer reviewed yet, but comes from a well-established research head and institute.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why we parted ways with Grammarly (and you should too) - jmedwards https://medium.com/kayako-engineering/why-we-parted-ways-with-grammarly-and-you-should-too-dea483bef823 ====== jgwhite I hope the post is fair. Let me know if it isn’t. Our goal is to explain the situation to our customers, and help make other teams aware that their apps may be suffering similar issues. ~~~ theblacktaxi Hey Jamie, my name is Sergey and I'm a developer for the Grammarly extension. Sorry to see you had so much trouble with Grammarly! That definitely wasn't our intention – quite the contrary. Thanks to your debugging video pinpointing the issue, we have been able to fix it. There was a bug where Grammarly would try to poke nodes outside of the input field in certain cases. It should be fixed now in the latest version of Grammarly for Chrome – please check it out and let me know if it helped. ~~~ 0xADADA Sergey, I'm also running into this. Is there a way to prevent grammarly from running on our app from the code? An a css class, or <meta> tag we can add to opt-out? ------ 0xADADA Holy crap, i just got our first bug report about this exact same problem, Ember 2.14. ~~~ jgwhite The latest version of the Grammarly extension resolved the problem entirely for us. Hope it does the same for you!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Can Humans Beat Google? New Search Engine Blekko Is a Great Concept, But ... - igravious http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/11/new-search-engine-blekko-is-a-great-concept-but/65517/ ====== scrrr The Google results for "vaccination" indeed are full of spam.. The idea is not bad. Google could add a "only trusted sites" sort of button and filter results accordingly to achieve a similar effect. On the other hand it should remain open for all sites by default. Even if it means spam in the search results. ------ Mithrandir <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vaccination> Couldn't see any spam until I got way down to the bottom.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Researchers say MS Edge's telemetry has worst privacy of any major browser - based2 https://winbuzzer.com/2020/03/17/researchers-say-microsoft-edges-telemetry-has-the-worst-privacy-of-any-major-browser-xcxwbn/ ====== jacquesm Worse than Chrome? That must have taken some doing then. Ah, here is the key in the article: "Notably, the study did not look at the web services provided by each of the companies, which also included Google, Apple, Brave, Mozilla. The focus was on the browsers themselves, rather than the ecosystem as a whole, which shows only one important part of the puzzle." That explains it. Is Brave even 'Major'? ~~~ Spooky23 It’s en vogue to complain about Google, but the stream of data flowing into Microsoft is incredible and who knows if or how it is being used. They have better competitive intelligence capability than any other company. Microsoft knows the org chart of millions of companies better than they do, knows who talks to who both in email and voice in some orgs, and knows where people work and where they move at work. The telemetry sent up for Windows and Office is pretty comprehensive and invasive as well. I wonder what they do with it. I see no evidence of improved product quality. ~~~ clairity complaining about google is nothing like the whims of fashion. google is a legitimate threat to privacy and liberty, and that should be laid bare repeatedly so we don't get complacent and forget. facebook as well, to a slightly lesser extent. microsoft is trying to compete on that front (poorly) and should also be called out. it's not an either-or proposition, but an all-of-the-above one. ~~~ rixed You forgot to say why Google would be a bigger threat than Microsoft, which is annoying given the person you are responding to clearly listed the reasons why Microsoft is actually collecting more informations than Google. Also, Microsoft has a much worse historical record than Google regarding protecting their users. For instance, at a time when Microsoft was happyly complying to every rules required to be allowed to do business in China, Google decided to not comply and close its offices in that country, all in the name of privacy. So yes, bashing Google in the comment section of an article about Microsoft Edge misbehavior certainly sounds like the whims of fashion, if not of organised business propaganda. edit: beating Android keyboard to oblivion ~~~ sjwright > You forgot to say why Google would be a bigger threat than Microsoft Microsoft wants you to use their spreadsheet software. Google is a significant gatekeeper to information which influences what we know and the opinions we form. And that information is increasingly first party, e.g. YouTube, the Play Store. ~~~ dntbnmpls > Microsoft wants you to use their spreadsheet software. ... and windows OS, visual studio, sql server, azure, linkedin, github, bing, skype, etc which all collects data on you. Also, I love that you dismissed their office suite as just "spreadsheet software". It's only the world's ubiquitous office suite used everywhere in the world. ~~~ nothrabannosir The idea behind that comment seems to have been: "MS has a known motive: they want to sell you software and make money. This is a business model I understand, and can deal with being on the other end of." The same argument is used in iOS vs Android debates: why isn't it the same shit, different smell? Because Apple sells you hardware, and Google sells You. The glib terseness of the comment is a metaphor for the relative harmlessness of the business model. Not indicative of the actual product selection or annual revenue. I think, anyway...? ~~~ dntbnmpls > MS has a known motive: they want to sell you software and make money. And the idea behind my comment was : They also want to sell you. Bing, linkedin, github, etc aren't selling you software. Also, windows OS has ads now. [https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956540/microsoft- window...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956540/microsoft- windows-10-ads-taskbar-file-explorer) > Because Apple sells you hardware, and Google sells You. Apple also sells you. They sell you to music, movie, etc industry in order for the industry to support apple's platform. > The glib terseness of the comment is a metaphor for the relative > harmlessness of the business model. Which I showed was wrong. It's insane the amount of microsoft and apple support on a tech platform. I guess all the money that microsoft/gates spent on PR truly worked. > I think, anyway...? I don't think you thought things through too well... Your argument was basically google sells chromebook/hardware so everything else they do is fine. ~~~ sjwright > Apple also sells you. By that logic, a shopping mall “sells you” to retail stores. A cinema “sells you” to movie studios. Etc. ~~~ dntbnmpls Only those shopping malls and cinema chains that get you to sign up for something and get your info and have tracking capability. What do you think AMC Stubs A-List program is about? Apple is worse than AMC or shopping malls since they have much more identifiable data on you ( even more than google in many respects ) and use that to sell you. Not just your data but recommendations/etc. Apple sells you in the same way google/facebook/microsoft/etc sells you. Collectively and individually. In the past shopping malls and cinemas used to sell you collectively to retail stores and movie studios. Now many of them can sell you individually to retail stores and movie studios. Something really has gone wrong when there is support for Apple on a tech forum. Usually apple just preys upon non-tech people who like overpriced shiny things. It's strange the amount of "support" apple and microsoft gets nowadays. ~~~ sjwright Oh, I didn't realise you're just spinning conspiracy theories. If any of that were true, we'd know about it. There would be leaks from employees of the companies who are receiving this data from Apple. ------ Sephr There is something much more concerning that nobody is mentioning: Microsoft Edge removed encrypted sync. This sync data can include all of your browser history, which is arguably a much more serious privacy violation. Chrome allows you to set a separate encryption passphrase for syncing your preferences & history to Google's servers. Edge does not allow this. ~~~ modeless This feature (end-to-end encrypted sync) is huge for privacy, and nobody knows about it. It's never mentioned when people talk about privacy issues in browsers. It seems like people don't actually care to do slightly inconvenient things that will improve their privacy, they just like to be outraged about it on the internet. ------ alister > _Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, meanwhile, tag requests with identifiers, but > that information is reset when the browser is re-installed. All send details > of the webpages visited to the backend via auto-complete, but with verifying > identifiers. Chrome is, in this case, are persistent, while Safari’s are > ephemeral and Mozilla doesn’t have identifiers at all._ First it says, _Firefox tags with identifiers_ , then it says, _Mozilla [Firefox] doesn’t have identifiers at all_. What explains this apparent contradiction? ~~~ officialjunk to me it seems they may think firefox and mozilla are two different things. ~~~ Roboprog Or perhaps Brave was supposed to be one of those items? Clearly, the article needed editorial proof reading in a few spots. ------ dang The paper is here: [https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf](https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf). Should we change the URL to it above? The comments are pretty tied to the claims of the current article at this point. ------ kojoru Note there's Microsoft's reply here: [https://winbuzzer.com/2020/03/20/microsoft-responds-to- resea...](https://winbuzzer.com/2020/03/20/microsoft-responds-to-researchers- claim-that-edge-is-the-worst-for-privacy-xcxwbn/) Apparently this hardware identifier is used to be able to comply with gdpr data deletion requests. ~~~ gentleman11 Nonsense. You have to track people in order to know that you are not tracking some people? ------ thekyle I don't understand Microsoft's angle with all of their telemetry in products like Windows, VS Code, Edge, etc. Microsoft's biggest businesses are; * Azure * Software licensing fees (Windows/Office/etc) * Gaming stuff (XBox, etc) None of these benefit from having tons of data on their customers. Some of them might even lose sales because of it (do enterprises want their data sucked up into the cloud when using Office or Windows). Bing Ads make up such a small amount of Microsoft's income that they're pretty much irrelevant. It seems to me that the rational thing would be to take the Apple approach. Use privacy as a feature that Google can't copy. Take advantage of the fact that one of their biggest competitors is mostly funded by targeted advertising and go where they cannot. Since Microsoft is not doing that, and they're not stupid I must assume that I am missing something. ~~~ ngold What a world we could live in if Microsoft was a privacy champion. It would make a massive amount of fans. ------ heartbeats Title is not ideal - suggest change to "Researchers say MS Edge's telemetry has worst privacy among major browsers" ~~~ dang We've changed it above. ------ based2 [https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/fmydx0/research...](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/fmydx0/researchers_say_microsoft_edges_telemetry_has_the/) ~~~ lucb1e I'm guessing you want to point out the top comment? Reddit user CobraCabana wrote: > This article isn’t about the telemetry data it’s about the identifiers. > Edge sends over a unique identifier for the hardware > Chrome and safari send one based on installation instance. Chrome persists > the identifier safari doesn’t > Firefox doesn’t send any identifier. ------ bdcravens Site posts article about browser privacy while asking if they can send you notifications. ~~~ glenneroo At least they ask. ------ ryanmarsh It just makes up for their lack of a major search engine. I'm pretty sure it's safe to say Google knows more about you than Microsoft. ------ 5cott0 I'm starting to think Google PR's favorite channel is the editorial content advertisement. ------ seemslegit In Microsofts defense - this could simply be due to the authors inability to address the multitude of different data exfiltration surfaces in FF and Chrome ------ what-the-grump Am I missing something or the paper is not linked? Or are my ad-blockers blocking something on the page. Also, how are the virtualized tabs tracked? ------ blibble the company behind the ad and spyware infested Windows 10 continued that abuse with their new browser? I'm surprised, I really am ------ justlexi93 And I need to remind you that we’re talking about Out the Box here, not with add ins and extensions. Brave is capable of installing any extension found in the Chrome web apps page so you probably could tweak it further. ------ JMTQp8lwXL Why does this article keep resurfacing everywhere? I've seen it on /r/technology multiple times. I refuse to believe it. Chrome has to have the most telemetry: it is produced by an ad company after all. Of all organizations maintaining major browsers, Google is the most incentivized to collect data. Follow the money. ~~~ AlexMax I don't necessarily agree with your argument - I think it's a perfectly reasonable conclusion that either Microsoft and Google could have worse telemetry in their browser. That said, I noticed the strange behavior around this article as well. I've seen it pop up multiple times in various content aggregators, and the /r/technology mods even removed the post that I happened to notice and comment in. I'm not sure why, it seemed like a completely reasonable article on its face. But maybe there's something underhanded going on behind the scenes? ~~~ JMTQp8lwXL Google's primary business is telemetry: I'd be shocked if they were worse at it than Microsoft. But I'm willing to accept you might disagree with this point. Regarding the second point: And I think we agree here, the article is odd. It definitely seems like there's an anti-Edge narrative trying to achieve mindshare. I should have decoupled my original comment, and only discussed the circulation of the article, as that's more concerning. ~~~ enos_feedler Google’s primary business is telemetry? Explain! ~~~ JMTQp8lwXL A means to an end for serving relevant ads, their bread and butter. ~~~ scarejunba Their bread and butter is search ads, my dude. They don't need telemetry for that. They have search keywords. Almost all of their revenue comes from there and the margin there is huge. ~~~ Terretta What source suggests Google’s AdWords ads distributed across the entire web (all the AdWords sites that aren’t SERPs) don’t leverage telemetry and don’t drive meaningful revenue? ------ halyconWays The worst telemetry of any major browser _so far_ , son. ~~~ yjftsjthsd-h Since most researchers are unable to see the future, it's generally accepted that such studies are done on the present and/or past. ~~~ halyconWays Because it's not possible to see that every version of Windows has invaded your privacy more than every previous version, nor is it possible to extrapolate that they're going to continue down this path unless something stops them.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
This place is not a place of honor - carbocation http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm ====== grzm Previous discussion a year ago (280 comments): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851871](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851871) Submitted a couple other times in the past as well, just not as much discussion: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=This%20place%20is%20not%20a%20...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=This%20place%20is%20not%20a%20place%20of%20honor&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0) ------ RcouF1uZ4gsC This whole thing is an offshoot of antinuclear FUD. If civilization collapses to the point where people no longer realize that radiation is dangerous, then so many people have already died that a few more people dying early from radiation is just background noise. In addition, knowing human nature and our propensity for conspiracy theories, there will be people in the future who think all those signs were put there to dissuade people from finding a massive buried treasure. (After all, the phrasing is pretty much what you would expect if someone had buried a treasure and wanted to make scare people from digging for it. ~~~ ianai They were tasked with making signs that would be deciferable for the entire time the site was hot-something like 10000 then later 100000 years. Let's see you do better. ~~~ slededit I think his proposal was to do nothing, since if the signs were ever needed we'd have bigger problems. Whether that's better is arguable. ~~~ ianai One possible scenario where it's forgotten about does not mean there aren't others. Maybe the files for the site die a beurocratic death and 9000 years later there aren't any records available regarding the site. Now, one possible alternative would be to incorporate some of the waste into a monolith. People may not be able to decipher or heed warnings but they will probably avoid the thing that kills them. (Probably wouldn't make it past the ERB though) ~~~ slededit I think the premise is that Geiger counters would be ubiquitous in pretty much every scenario except the catastrophic destruction of civilization. Radiation itself is its own warning sign if you are sufficiently advanced technologically. ~~~ beojan As far as I am aware, we don't routinely check archeological sites with a Geiger counter before digging. ~~~ slededit You would be surprised at how closely the US is monitored with radiation detectors. There's been more than a few false alarms with pets undergoing cancer treatment for example [1]. I wouldn't be surprised if nearly every square mile of the US was closely monitored now, let alone in a thousand years. > “Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour,” Giuliano told the crowd. “Agent is > in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and > identified an isotope [in the passing car].” > “Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological > treatment three days earlier,” Giuliano said. [1] [http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/watch-out-youre- bei...](http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/watch-out-youre-being- watched/) ~~~ ianai I had no idea. I wonder if they've ever actually stopped a nuclear threat. On the one hand, it's reassuring to know things are that closely monitored that could kill millions. On the other, who knows what other forms of monitoring are in-use. ------ umanwizard I'm reminded of Japanese tsunami stones: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html) They are markers hundreds of years old warning future villagers not to build below certain points (high-water marks for past tsunamis). In some locations they are still respected today. ------ Animats Seen that piece before. Here's the marker at the SL-1 reactor burial site.[1] This already looks dated, and it's only a few decades old. (It's not from 1961; it's from a later secondary cleanup.) The skull and crossbones is no longer used much for hazardous materials, and might be misread as a warning of chemically toxic waste. The road sign for "no pedestrians" is not really appropriate. The abstract radiation trefoil is only meaningful if you know what it means. [1] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/96/SL...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/96/SL-1Burial.jpg/1280px- SL-1Burial.jpg) ------ sgt101 One thing that appears not to have been considered is allowing a small amount of dangerous material to be uncovered in each major attempt to access the site. This would be a brutal way to limit the damage from repeated treasure hunts, but it would prevent someone from drilling into the whole cache and killing vast numbers of innocents. ~~~ mjevans Curse of the ancient tombs of X... ------ ameliaquining The link title should have a [1992] annotation. ------ kbutler Interesting how mobile-friendly sites from 25 years ago are. ~~~ SapphireSun I think it's worth adding a max width, it makes the columns easier to read if they're not too long. Other than that, it's pretty great. ------ TeMPOraL I still think the best way is to dig deep and pad it densely with filler material. The point is, for the future civilization to be able to reach the material, it would need to develop to the level of middle-XX-century technology, at which point they'd most likely be able to handle the waste. ------ robert_foss This reminds me of the excellent Finnish documentary "Into Eternity" which treads into the same territory and takes a few steps further. How do you communicate with a civilization that has no ties with to the current one? ------ dwaltrip I feel it would be very worthwhile to add a second set of signs/materials that assumes whomever is reading them has at least some level of scientific proficiency. ~~~ LoSboccacc Should have stages. First room myhical connotations. Second puctogram of radiation. Third atomic elements drawn. Fourth a well preserved (albeit powered off) geiger counter to reverse engineer, fifth the element stored in a case with more warnings and a dot notation trying to relate the box content with the actual stored quantity	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A 1,000-year-old road lost to time - MiriamWeiner http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181203-a-1000-year-old-road-lost-to-time ====== rayiner This writing is so pretentious. > As I trudged through the streets of Lucca on my first day, the sun shone hot > on my skin and the wind brushed my face. Without the protection of a car or > bus, I smelled every rubbish bin and felt the whoosh of passing cyclists. I > heard the gentle thud of my feet and noticed how the texture of the ground – > whether earth, grass, cobblestone or cement – changed my stride. That is walking. He is literally just describing walking. > On my third night, I was eating dinner with other pilgrims in a hostel > outside the vertiginous hill town of Gambassi Terme (I chose the small hotel > because when I arrived, my feet riddled with crippling blisters, I knew that > if I stayed there I would not have to climb the steep slope before I could > rest). Here is the Italian version of the 7-11 in this "vertiginous hill town." [https://www.google.com/maps/@43.5352956,10.9519354,3a,71.1y,...](https://www.google.com/maps/@43.5352956,10.9519354,3a,71.1y,124.87h,92.46t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sxj54syDPdbLo3Xs6WARphA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656). He's not in the wilderness here. He's walking through semi-rural/suburban Italy between populated towns. > As we dug into plates of pasta al pomodoro (pasta with tomato sauce) Oh FFS. ~~~ slothtrop > This writing is so pretentious. What is it pretending? ~~~ jolmg pretentious[1] != pretending[2] [1] [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/pretentious](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/pretentious) [2] [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/pretending](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/pretending) ~~~ slothtrop It's just a form of it. "Characterized by assumption [...]" that's pretending. "making an exaggerated outward show"; pretending. "full of pretense"; hey, what does the definition for that return? - [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/pretense](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/pretense) If it can be characterized as such, then one ought to be able to elucidate why. ~~~ jolmg > "Characterized by assumption [...]" that's pretending Maybe by a meaning of "assumption" or "pretending" that I'm not too familiar with. Normally, I would think that someone "assuming" thinks something is true and acts like so, and someone "pretending" thinks it's not true but acts like it is. > "making an exaggerated outward show"; pretending My English must be lacking... Exaggerated just means making something more apparent than it needs to be. That's also different to pretending. > "full of pretense"; hey, what does the definition for that return? Ok, you convince me there's related meanings with that. ------ njarboe Here is a link to a map of the whole road as the article and official website don't seem to have one[1]. There are nice interactive maps for each country at the official site though[2]. [1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Francigena#/media/File:VF_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Francigena#/media/File:VF_Ruta_completa_con_pricipales_poblaciones.svg) [2][https://www.viefrancigene.org/en/resource/tour/la-via- franci...](https://www.viefrancigene.org/en/resource/tour/la-via-francigena- in-francia/) ------ Fwirt > Lucca had faded into semi-rural, semi-industrial outskirts that will likely > never be on any tour itinerary. It was not particularly impressive or photo- > worthy – it was a moment that would be hard to justify to someone else, to > explain why, out of all the things I could have done, I had chosen to be > there. I beg to differ. My wife and I made a day trip there when we were staying in Florence. Lucca is a beautiful little town with some cool medieval architecture and history. It's a rare example of a town that still has its original walls intact. There were tourists but it wasn't crowded, and for under 10 euros you can climb a couple towers from the 14th century for a spectacular view of the town and rural countryside. Highly recommended if you're in the area. ~~~ daphneokeefe I believe he is referring to the area he traveled through after he left Lucca, not Lucca itself, which is on many tour itineraries. ~~~ pugworthy > he her ~~~ jermaustin1 > her she ~~~ pugworthy Werds. Better grammar than gender. ------ jaclaz Official site of the Via Francigena: [https://www.viefrancigene.org/en/](https://www.viefrancigene.org/en/) Side note: > _The saying ‘all roads lead to Rome’ has become a quaint and somewhat > clichéd turn-of-phrase these days. But when the Roman Empire ruled over > places such as England, present-day Spain, North Africa, and even modern-day > Israel and Turkey, it was true._ [https://sashat.me/2017/06/03/roman- roads/](https://sashat.me/2017/06/03/roman-roads/) discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14511627](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14511627) ~~~ iosonofuturista It seems we killed the site again, so here are some mirrors: [https://sashat.me/wp- content/uploads/2017/06/Rome_III-01-1.p...](https://sashat.me/wp- content/uploads/2017/06/Rome_III-01-1.png) [https://i.imgur.com/cun1MCJ.png](https://i.imgur.com/cun1MCJ.png) ------ arethuza Not far from where I live is a completely overgrown path/road known as the "Old North Road" \- looking at the landscape it takes a route that was probably the easiest way through the hills before more modern roads of recent centuries. Maybe Agricola's armies marched that way from their camp on a nearby hill to help rescue the 9th Legion... who knows? ------ cmroanirgo For those who might prefer less story, and more 'meat and bones'. A little known fact: Many of Australia's roads were originally mapped out by Aboriginals, who used songlines (/the stars) to navigate. This means many of Australia's main roads are 10's of thousands years old. (Admittedly, the roads didn't actually exist, even though the pathway did) Research by Ray Norris (of CSIRO) is very interesting: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.02215](https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.02215) His website on Aboriginal Astronomy: emudreaming.com ~~~ photojosh Thanks for this. I've recently been reading Bruce Pascoe's 'Dark Emu', which is on how Aboriginal Australians had agriculture too, even recorded in the journals of the original Euro explorers but now lost to public consciousness. ------ JoeAltmaier Fascinating. I wish the article had actual pictures along the route, instead of bland standin pictures of anywhere (feet, streams, roads that aren't the Francigena etc) ------ zygotic12 The BBC is awesome in many ways but this 'travel' show is such bollocks it's amazing. They tourist like a MF instead of doing the Bourdain and actually speaking to people who live there. EDIT: actually rather than interview I would like to stress ------ amatecha I have traveled to Europe a handful of times and never heard of this until now! Time to add this to the list of things to check out next time. Very cool. :) ------ baud147258 > Walking over long distances, sometimes as far as 24km a day, was new to me. 24 km ain't a long distance to walk in a day	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Second Life land value, premium accounts decline - ilamont http://thestandard.com/news/2008/07/01/second-life-users-spending-more-time-world-are-they-paying ====== thorax Second Life recently substantially cut prices for their "new" island sales. I think it's likely the decreased land sales figures could be caused by that big price drop-- and not necessarily showing less demand for virtual land. More people may be buying from Linden rather than others. Still, not the sort of trends Linden would want people to be thinking too deeply about. ------ rms In MMOGs, the value of in-game assets inevitably declines. If you could short the WoW gold, that would be a great move. Just be ready for the Chinese New Year price fluctuation. ~~~ byrneseyeview Shouldn't you be able to short it? If you have a good in-game and out-game reputation, would you be able to borrow gold, convert to cash, and then convert cash to gold when your debt comes due? ~~~ iron_ball Yes, but for anyone with any professional skills at all, that kind of arbitrage just isn't a good time investment compared to real work. I did the math once. WoW doesn't really permit economies of scale on this sort of thing -- there are no free markets, so you have to go through uniformly shady RMT ("Real Money Trading") brokers who will be quick to freeze you out if they sense you're making a mass profit over their channels. ~~~ byrneseyeview Do they freeze you out if you're making money for them, too? Let's say I am consistently good at predicting one-month 20% declines in the value of WoW gold. And I invest, say, $100 in gold on a 5% commission, and cash out with that same 5% commission. If I'm making them money (often), why would they give me a reason to switch to a different broker? Is $100 now really better than $10/month? ------ babul As we see global property recession/dip in the real world, will will see this in virtual worlds like Second Life et al? ------ jrockway Wow, screenshots of Excel spreadsheets? I hear HTML has a <table> tag for that sort of thing. ~~~ fourlittlebees So it makes more sense to recreate a table than grab a screenshot? I'm all for hand-coding HTML, but I'd rather grab a quick shot than type tr, td all day long. ~~~ jrockway You must be one of those folks that designs their web site in photoshop and then just uploads the image to the server. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Properly configure Google Apps' Gmail and get rid of "via" - StavrosK http://www.stavros.io/posts/how-properly-configure-google-apps-email/ ====== joshfraser This is tangental, but while we're talking about SPF... I've noticed lately that it's getting trickier for businesses to stay within the 10 DNS lookups per SPF record limit. For example, Google's official SPF record is _spf.google.com which in turn includes _netblocks.google.com, _netblocks2.google.com and _netblocks3.google.com. That's 4 DNS lookups. Use Salesforce? They include Google's SPF record in theirs. Use Zendesk? Their previously published SPF records are support.zendesk.com and smtp.zendesk.com. Both those record include mail.zendesk.com which includes _spf.zdsys.com which includes _netblocks.zdsys.com. The number of includes/DNS lookups is a growing problem as these businesses continue adding more IPs. If you're allowing several external services to send email on your behalf, you might want to double check your SPF record to see how many DNS requests you're making. ------ qwerta Properly configure your email and get rid of 'GMail' :-) ------ swamp40 I got rid of the 'via' just using a free Gmail account. (Google Apps used to have a nice wizard that walked you thru it, but they have recently stopped giving away Apps for free.) My website was registered thru Godaddy for $3.17 (I had a coupon) and is hosted on an Amazon EC2 micro instance (free for a year), so the cost is hard to beat. I could share the details if anyone was interested. The settings on all three (Godaddy, Gmail, Amazon) have to be tweaked. ------ aktau Anyone have an idea for how to do this with regular gmail? I have a domain that I manage via outlook.com (it's free and Google Apps isn't anymore), and I managed to fabricate my own SPF record that authorizes both gmail and outlook senders, but I'm a bit stumped for the DKIM. Do I need to "generate" it from gmail or outlook, or both? And if so, where? Can't find the option anywhere. Maybe it's something exclusive for Google Apps? ~~~ StavrosK The sending server (Gmail) needs to DKIM-sign your email, and plain Gmail doesn't have the capability to do that. ------ belthasar If you use Mandrill to send your emails you'll want to do this too. [http://help.mandrill.com/entries/21751322-What-are-SPF- and-D...](http://help.mandrill.com/entries/21751322-What-are-SPF-and-DKIM-and- do-I-need-to-set-them-up-) ~~~ StavrosK You pretty much have to set the SPF field regardless of where you host your email. I don't know if Mandrill signs DKIM and give you a key to add. ~~~ dangrossman > I don't know if Mandrill signs DKIM and give you a key to add. They do. ------ figurify one of the most annoying things in history kinda sorta relieved ~~~ StavrosK Ugh, I know, it bugged me for ages as well. Setting those two headers resolved it, and now I no longer need to maintain my own server. ------ CoreyH144 503 Over Quota. Does anyone have a link to a cache of this? ~~~ JimWestergren [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A//www.stavros.io/posts/how- properly-configure-google-apps-email/&safe=active&as_qdr=all) ~~~ StavrosK Works again, thanks. ------ famousactress Is there any evidence the "via" affects SPAM flagging? ~~~ StavrosK It's not the "via" that affects it, it's not having DKIM and SPF. Those definitely do affect it. ------ kevingadd I started using gmail to send through my personal domain and had been kind of perplexed by this myself. Nice to know it's possible to fix it (even if it's really convoluted just how many steps you have to take to configure everything correctly). You have to send through SMTP instead of through Gmail's servers (Though oddly enough, the SMTP server _belongs to Google_...), set up SPF and DKIM manually, etc etc. EDIT: Just found this, great way to create SPF DNS strings: [http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/...](http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/) It actually explains all the syntax and lets you edit it easily. Much less confusing than trying to figure out what the hell the elements of the SPF string do by yourself and then waiting hours to see how verifiers parse it. ~~~ StavrosK You _don 't_ have to send through alternate SMTP servers (even if they're Google's). Let me know if that's unclear in the post and I'll edit it. ~~~ kevingadd No, you actually do according to some other sources I looked up. If you don't set up your gmail to use alternate SMTP, the headers end up slightly different and your actual gmail account shows up in the headers. By switching it to send via SMTP and then plugging in the SMTP details for my apps account, the gmail account was replaced in the headers by the apps account. ~~~ StavrosK I don't know, I tested both ways myself and the headers were the same both times. To clarify, my account is an _apps_ account, there's no plain-gmail account in my setup. I only have one account, the other domain is just an alias to it (so my SMTP settings of the account just pointed to itself). ~~~ kevingadd OK, that is the confusing thing. I thought you were making your personal gmail account send through your apps account (since it owns the domain). I guess it was unclear because when you said 'Gmail' I thought you meant gmail.com gmail, not apps mail. ~~~ StavrosK Hmm yeah, it is confusing. I will clarify, thanks.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: I am designing a iOS app. Is there a cheat sheet for sizing? - allsystemsgo Also, for retina display, don't I basically need to make the designs twice to accomodate for both retina and non retina displays? Thanks for all your help. I'm new to mobile design. ====== michaelpinto You want to think in terms of aspect ratio first, and pixels second. Currently (and this may change) the iPad has the same aspect ratio that's shared between an iPad, an iPad with Retina and an iPad mini. On the other hand the iPhone 5 and say the iPhone 4s have different aspect ratios since the iPhone5 is taller. Also don't forget that your design has to be responsive so that it can go from horizontal to vertical. And then keep in mind that if at some later point you want to port to Android that there really aren't any fixed aspect ratios since there are so many devices. My advice is that you should sketch and then use an app like Keynote to see what your interface looks like on the device. You can be shocked sometimes just how different things feel when you go from a personal computer to a mobile device. ------ eduardordm No, you need 'textures' for both displays, but not geometry. The geometry has not changed in retina displays :D (This question was answered dozens of time @ stackoverflow, you should check there) This is why I'm converting an open source app I built to just render everything (using CG, not CALayer) instead of using images. Yeah, images are faster. But I hate to repeat myself and exporting images from photoshop is more time consuming than it seems. (Edit): Images are usually faster, but that's not entirely true if you use only CG calls on a drawRect. From a memory standpoint, keep in mind that a PNG file will occupy the 'framebuffer' + the original image + all the crap that comes with UIImage. By drawing it yourself, you will burn a little cpu time but than only the result buffer will allocated. ~~~ nglevin I don't really know what graphics you're drawing in your app, but this approach will kill the performance of anything that relies on the GPU. Since you're only using Core Graphics, this is acceptable. Core Graphics only has a CPU implementation on iOS. Core Animation has a CPU implementation that only gets activated under certain conditions; otherwise, it renders through the GPU by default. If you're planning on using CA... \- outside of -drawRect:, \- with no shadows or masks (transparent gradients, for instance,) \- without text (CATextLayer, UILabels, Core Text, UIFont,) \- with -shouldRasterize: assigned to NO (the default,) \- without overriding -drawInContext: (which draws a CALayer's content to a CGContext,) \- with any OpenGL code at all, ...you're going to quickly end up in the land of seconds per frame instead of frames per second. ~~~ eduardordm "Core Graphics only has a CPU implementation on iOS." No. :D ~~~ nglevin Would you care to elaborate, rather than be glib? QuartzGL runs all Core Graphics on the GPU[1]. It's only available on OS X. If you can show me evidence that some API on iOS runs Core Graphics on the GPU, I'd be happy to know. I do a fair amount of work running Core Animation, CG and OpenGL at the same time, so it would be a big help. [1] - [http://www.cocoawithlove.com/2011/03/mac- quartzgl-2d-drawing...](http://www.cocoawithlove.com/2011/03/mac- quartzgl-2d-drawing-on-graphics.html) ~~~ eduardordm This really isn't the place, but: You are confusing the composition and the actual rendering. When you use CG you are composing in the cpu but the actual result is always rendered by the gpu, there is no such thing as rendering by cpu in ios devices. When using opengl the composition and rendering will happen in the gpu. But this is not really important for static objects like buttons, they are built once, unless use force changes, it wont touch the cpu (written on a phone, sorry about typos) For instance, this is 100% gpu: [http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/ipad/#documentation/G...](http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/ipad/#documentation/GraphicsImaging/Reference/CGAffineTransform/Reference/reference.html%23//apple_ref/doc/c_ref/CGAffineTransform) ~~~ nglevin This is the place. It's HN! I have a strong suspicion that CGAffineTransform and its associated methods are calculated through the ARM NEON co-processor. I don't see anything in the documentation you provided that mentions the GPU. It _could_ be done in a vertex shader on the GPU, but looking at the API, the use of Rotation, Scale and Translation methods seems more consistent with it being done on the CPU or the CPU's floating point co-processor. Otherwise, there would be something equivalent to glBegin() or glEnd() to prep calls to update the uniforms for the shaders and render to the frame and render buffers, much like CA's transaction based API for animations - the block based API is similar, too.[1] Frankly, switching to a shader just to do rotation/scaling/translation is a bit much, and better left to the CPU in most cases. Andy Matsuchak of Apple claims that "When you implement drawRect or draw with CoreGraphics, you're using the CPU to draw, and that drawing will happen synchronously within your application. You're just calling some function which writes bits in a bitmap buffer, basically."[2] That is rendering. Unless you're confusing rendering with compositing layers, the act of blending several CALayers/UIViews together. The compositing bit is completely dependent on how you opted to draw your layers; some can be composited on the CPU, others on the GPU. I've listed all the ways that a layer can be composited on the CPU, it's just something to watch out for. [1] - I'll grant you that CA has an implicit animation API, but CA also has a much more elaborate system of keeping current state and projected state in place. CA has layer trees for each to avoid having to block the CPU and wait on the asynchronous GPU for results, which CG doesn't. [2] - [http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/36591648724/designing- for-...](http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/36591648724/designing-for-ios- graphics-performance#comment-720533654) ------ program247365 Check out the articles here: <http://bjango.com/articles/> Great resource for what you're looking for. Including downloadable Photoshop actions to make it all easier. ~~~ allsystemsgo Thanks. That'll help a lot. I'm tempted to leave the designing up to a professional.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Chaos Communication Congress Call for Participation - lorenzfx http://events.ccc.de/2014/07/12/31c3-call-for-participation-en/ ====== lawl > _As a speaker, you will have free admission._ That wasn't the case in the last years and i think it's a _bad_ change. Congress had always had this kind of community feeling and you could always hit up speakers in the hall ways and they'd treat you as equals. I kinda liked the rule that everyone has to pay the entrance fee, but maybe that's just me. I hope this doesn't change too much, but the kind of "huge family" feeling was already kind of going away when the event scaled from 3k to 10k people. Probably unavoidable at this scale though. Nevertheless, looking forward to another awesome c3. It's still my highlight of the year. ~~~ sneak > That wasn't the case in the last years and i think it's a bad change. It's bad form to ask speakers to donate their research, time, and breath, and then also ask them to pay for the privilege. When I spoke at the CCC, this miffed me a bit. ~~~ NickWarner775 Paying for the privilege to speak could deter less qualified speakers from leading the discussions, though. It would keep the quality of conversation high I think. Thoughts? ~~~ sp332 If you're really interested in hearing someone, why not reduce the barriers to having them come speak? And if you're not interested, why let them speak at all? ~~~ wink If I am not mistaken the ticket price was 80 EUR for four days. Believe me, I'm all for offering speakers travel reimbursement, but arguing about that ticket price is kind of out of place. ------ th0ma5 Such an astounding event, and they do their online presence so well.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: An organism which creates an ecosystem to feed on it - Lucadg Thinking about platforms as Amazon, Uber or Facebook I'm wondering if we can find similar dynamics in nature.<p>Parasites feed on top of bigger organisms but nothing comes to mind about organisms which create or facilitate and ecosystem and then control it and feed on it.<p>It would be a powerful analogy.<p>Thanks! ====== Libeste The word you're looking for is 'Cultivation.' You've basically described farming and ranching. Plenty of analogies there, though many of them have already been used. ~~~ Lucadg that's a good one thanks! One aspect which does not fit too much it the fact that the farmer cuts the plants to eat them and the rancher kills the animals. Uber or Airbnb don't kill the users, they keep them alive and extract a part of the value created. I think I got it thanks to you tough: milking cows. Does it work? Too harsh? ~~~ Libeste There's also orchards, and beekeeping, raising chickens for eggs might qualify. As well as this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism) ------ jimparkins Beaver dams ~~~ Lucadg Thanks, interesting ------ fullmoon888 The Matrix! Harvesting humans in silos to extract energy ~~~ Lucadg The Matrix is better, humans just sleep there :) In Uber, Airbnb or Amazon they need to work!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Shadow at a startup for a day - adamzerner Hi guys, I'm 21, learning to code, and interesting in working at a startup. I'll be attending Fullstack Academy (S12) starting September 15th, but I'm taking a trip out to SF this Wednesday for 5 days (7/20-7/25).<p>I want to get a feel for what work at a startup is like. Would anyone who works at a startup mind if I shadowed them for a day? Or does anyone know anyone who they think would be interested? I'm not sure if I'm good enough to be useful, but if I could be of any use I'd love to write some code for you! (I've been teaching myself to code on and off for the past year and a half or so. I'd classify my skills as a strong beginner/weak intermediate developer. I know HTML, CSS, JS/jQuery, Ruby and Rails. I built a few sites before - https://github.com/adamzerner?tab=repositories.<p>Edit: I'm also considering moving to SF after Fullstack. There's a lot of good tech companies there, and I really like the culture. So I also want to get a feel for what it'd be like living in SF. I've visited before and have done all the touristy things, but I want to get a feel for what it'd be like <i>living</i> there. I was thinking of visiting a hacker house and some co-working spaces, but don't know what else would be useful. Any ideas?<p>Thanks! ====== tptacek You might be heading towards an adverse selection problem here. For every viable startup, there are 10 that aren't. It's more likely that a non-viable startup would want code from someone who is going to be gone in a few days or weeks or even months. So you might be selecting for the wrong kinds of organizations with an offer like this. A full-on internship might be a better bet.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Sierra On-line founder Ken Williams on Adventure gaming in the 80s - peterkelly http://guysfromandromeda.com/ken-williams-joins-chris-pope-live-interview-6812/ ====== mickeyp Sierra ushered in an era of Adventure games, but it took the upstart company games company LucasArts to perfect the formula and eliminate the tedium of being stuck in the latter parts of the game, having failed to pick up the right item or trigger the right sequence, way back in the beginning. Not to mention the frustration many a gamer felt when the protagonist got killed off for seemingly stupid reasons. ~~~ sanswork Funny as it sounds my least favourite experience in gaming was playing the original police quest on my uncles IBM PC(think it was like the model 2 maybe? Circa mid-late 80s) and having the driving portions be impossible due to the car racing around and not having any diagonal steering(20+ turns to get into a parking spot!). It wasn't until many years later when I purchased a rerelease that I was able to fully enjoy the depth of those early games. ~~~ mickeyp I remember that. You had to set the game speed to a crawl; good luck going up the on-ramps for the motorway as well. Oh, and if you did not "walk around" the car and thus 'inspect it', your game would end as your car "would break down." Yikes. I also remember that you had to stop a drunk driver and if you didn't write -- and I remember this even to this day -- "issue field sobriety test", exactly, you could never continue with the game. ------ peterkelly What I think is so great about the way Ken ran the company was that he was genuinely committed to giving game designers a great deal of creative freedom, and was willing to take risks on new ideas - something you don't see a lot of in today's large game companies. Within the realm of adventure games, Sierra came out with an incredibly wide range of material. Their games were a big part of what got me into computers in the first place. ~~~ Happer Their games also got me into computers. But they also encouraged me as a 10 year old to learn and understand English. I remember playing with 2 different dictionaries, looking up every word I didn't understand. Thanks Ken & Roberta! ------ DisconnectD Its so freaking awesome for Ken and Roberta Williams to take such a personal interest in the Two Guys Kickstarter. It makes me wish SIERRA didn't get destroyed and sold off for spare parts. Still, as long as we get the Two Guys back I'M SOLD! ------ mkramlich Ken, Roberta and Sierra are one of the biggest reasons I'm a programmer today. Played their games as a kid, some of my own first programming was making games, and I dreamed of running my own computer game company as an adult. The Sierra story as told in Levy's Hackers, in particular was a big inspiration to me as well. ------ wozname He is one of the Hackers in Steven Levy's Book pubished in 1984: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution) ------ thevader So damn cool! Just take my money already - back www.tgakick.com	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why Y Combinator News is so popular? - martinbc Sometimes newbie questions are the most interesting , it isn't this case, but let's see what happen.<p>The point is that I can't understand why Hacker News has so success.. Design is very poor and seems like 90's websites, the submit form is saddest of all the web. Social interaction is almost zero, is an involution of forums (which we know that they went out of fashion).<p>I know that I has some innovative business logic with its submissions, positive votes and karma. But I am sure that if anyone try to do something like this, (now or at 2007 when Hacker News was born), it would have less than ten visits per day.<p>I have to say that it generate me a great confusion, because as you know, all technologies and web sites move toward social media, innovated designs, javascript... We spend hours and hours trying to javascript works and making the best look & feel. And then you see how simple is Hacker News and I don't know if I have mistaken of profession and I had to be lawyer.<p>So, WHY we love it?<p>I hope you understand my humor, because my English is not the best. ====== geoffschmidt Because HN actually has the best content, it doesn't have to do any of the other things you mention to get users. So it can focus on the thing that really matters, which is the value that users get from the site, which in the case of HN has nothing to do with graphic design or trend-following social features. If something is low quality, but many people use it anyway, that means that there is a part of it that is truly world class. ------ paulsutter When the evidence strongly contradicts your assumptions, you may want to revisit them. I'n here because the featured articles and comments are well aligned with the interests of technology entrepreneurs like me. HN development effort is wisely directed towards improving voting and ranking. Making the "innovations" you describe would be like using cake frosting to put a fancy design on a grilled salmon. I love the existing low latency/low bandwidth design of HN. It works great on my iphone in limited connectivity conditions, much better than normal websites. It's a real plus, but minor compared to the quality of articles and comments. ------ project23 I can't answer for others but here are my personal reasons (in no particular order): 1\. The community. Its better than anything I can find elsewhere at the moment for its size and diversity. 2\. The content. This, like the answer above, is the same. 3\. Engagement levels are decent. Please note that better does not mean best, it just means its better that anything else I can find. ------ coryl For me: \- Really good articles and content posted and upvoted. \- Good quality comments and lots of expertise from individuals from every sector of tech. \- No trolls / bs comments like most anonymous forums (ok, a few, but they get downvoted quickly). ------ 27182818284 Every other social news site tends to pull away from techish news. Hacker News does it too from time to time, but on the average, it does a good job at it. I also love people like Peter Norvig jumping in and talking about a subject or some random startup "Show HN"ing their new product. ------ csense 1) The subject matter. 2) High-quality comments. 3) I actually like sites with a simple UI. I still haven't figured out the Reddit user interface. I gave up on Facebook years ago, after their third or fourth site redesign. ------ saiko-chriskun As with all things, community (i.e. network-effect) is what's most important. e.g. craigslist ------ thejteam The slightly obnoxious answer would be volumes of people trying to suck up to the YCombinator decision makers. Despite this sucking up, the discussion, especially if you are good at scanning through comments, is still the best I have seen. So that is why I like it. ------ pmtarantino People using it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Seventeenth-Century Tunnel in Mexico Preserves Pre-Contact Artwork - Thevet https://www.archaeology.org/news/8134-191024-mexico-tunnel-images ====== droithomme Here's a good article explaining in detail these dike and other water control systems engineered by the Mexica. Really impressive. [https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/home/water-in-valley- of-...](https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/home/water-in-valley-of-mexico) Also explains why Cortés destroyed them: it was to destroy their fresh water supply during a siege. ------ azinman2 Where are the Images? ~~~ joveian There is one image at Mexico News Daily: [https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/archaeologists-find- tunnel-...](https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/archaeologists-find-tunnel-with- pre-hispanic-images/) This is almost just blogspam except for the additional archology.org link at the end: [https://www.archaeology.org/issues/138-1407/features/2173-me...](https://www.archaeology.org/issues/138-1407/features/2173-mexico- city-aztec-buried-world) IMO the link should be changed to the Mexico News Daily article.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Octopress on Raspberry Pi - darryldias https://revryl.com/2013/12/28/octopress-raspberry-pi/ ====== rikkus sudo chmod 777 -R /var/www/ Please don't do that ~~~ darryldias I will look into this and fix it, Thank you.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Wrong Abstraction (2016) - mkchoi212 https://www.sandimetz.com/blog/2016/1/20/the-wrong-abstraction ====== Tainnor I feel some people here are misunderstanding the blog post. Sandi Metz IMHO doesn't claim that the problem occurs at step 2 or 3. She doesn't claim that it's wrong to introduce abstraction when there is duplication. What she is saying instead is that the problem occurs from step 6 onwards: when you find yourself wanting to reuse an abstraction that, regardless of whether it made sense in the first place or not, has outlived its usefulness. I think this is in agreement with other points that she often makes, about being bold, but methodical about refactorings. The whole discussion about "you should never abstract away code before you see the third duplication" has little to do with the article, and I'm also really not sure it's good advice. ~~~ BoiledCabbage > What she is saying instead is that the problem occurs from step 6 onwards: > when you find yourself wanting to reuse an abstraction that, regardless of > whether it made sense in the first place or not, has outlived its > usefulness. You're 100% correct in this. And what's even more amazing to me is that even after you explicitly calling this out, the majority of people replying to you (and presumably have read the article) still think the problem is between 2 & 3. The argument she is making is not "don't make abstractions until you're 100% certain they are correct". She is essentially saying make abstractions where appropriate. Some of these abstractions will be wrong. When you start seeing yourself making certain behaviors it's probably because it's the wrong abstraction, so back it out and refactor. Ultimately that abstraction seemed right based on the info known at the time it was created, now that you know more don't try to cling to it because it was already made. Be ok with backing it out and refactoring. ~~~ qznc If you see an abstraction does not fit, you have the choice to consider it incomplete or unsuitable. If incomplete, you can fix it (assuming write access). If unsuitable, you should "back it out" as you say. In my opinion this distinction is applicable and thus useful in contrast to whining about leaky abstractions: [http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/leaky_abstractions.html](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/leaky_abstractions.html) ~~~ Firadeoclus It seems to me that a straightforward fixing of an incomplete abstraction is exactly what Sandi Metz warns against (i.e. steps 5+6). The abstraction is "almost perfect", so it should not fall in the "unsuitable" category. It just so happens that complecting several slightly different uses in one abstraction comes at a significant cost. Backing out (inlining the abstraction, eliminating unused code) is a simple recipe to let you see the true amount of overlap, which may or may not itself be a suitable candidate for a smaller abstraction. ~~~ qznc I rather see Sandis post as a criterium when an abstraction should be considered unsuitable: When you use only a small fraction of it because of conditionals. ~~~ ryanbrunner I think that's probably correct in describing where you end up, but not any particular step along the way. It's one of those "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" situations. When you first modify the abstraction, it's nearly perfect. Just one tiny conditional and it's a perfectly suitable abstraction again. The problem is, when this process repeats itself, you slowly get to the point where any one client of the abstraction is only using a small fraction of it, but there was never a singular point where someone made a decision to use the abstraction when it was anything less than "almost perfect". ------ jpswade You can’t plan for what you don’t know. This is why I like the "Rule of three"[1]. Only once you've done it three times will you truly begin to understand what the abstraction might need to look like. 1\. [https://wade.be/2019/12/10/rule-of- three.html](https://wade.be/2019/12/10/rule-of-three.html) ~~~ ed312 Any advice on teaching this to junior engineers? Seems like folks with 3-5 years of experience keep trying to not only over-abstract but also keep re- inventing the wheel with abstractions (vs looking for existing libraries). ~~~ ozim My favorite example of really bad abstraction is add/edit crammed into single popup/model. You know edit is basically a copy paste of add so "ding ding ding here goes DRY!" in a junior mind. But quickly enough it shows up that some properties can be set in add, whereas in edit they have to be read only. Quite often you get also other business rules that can be applied only on edit or make sense only when adding new entity. But when you create first version they look a lot like the same code that should be reused. For me this is really good example of how similar looking code is not the same because it has different use case. ~~~ gridlockd > But quickly enough it shows up that some properties can be set in add, > whereas in edit they have to be read only. So? Just put in some conditionals. What is the alternative? Duplicate most of the code with minor, non-explicit differences? What's the benefit? You just _moved_ complexity around, you didn't get rid of it. The drawback is that now anything you have to add, you have to add _and_ maintain it in two places. And since your "add" and "edit" are probably 90% the same, it's going to happen 90% of the time. It's very annoying during development and you're likely to fuck it up at some point. ~~~ bonestormii_ This is a good example of how this overall topic gets reduced to "How much abstraction?" instead of "In what ways should something be abstracted?" Obviously an Add/Edit field are operating on the same record in a hypothetical database, so it makes little sense to duplicate the model. On the other hand, if the conditionals within the abstracted version become too complex or keep referencing some notion of a mode of operation (like, ` if type(self) == EditType && last_name != null` lines of thinking), that is sometimes another type of smell. But say you make some kind of abstract base class that validates all fields in memory before committing to the database, and then place all of your checking logic in a validate() method. That sounds like pretty clean abstractions to me. And moreover, this is probably provided by an ORM system and documented by that system anyway--so that's a publicly documented and likely very common abstraction that you see even between different ORMs. That, I think, is the very best kind of abstraction, at least assuming you are already working in such an environment as a high-level language and ORM. Making raw SQL queries from C programs still contain their own levels of abstractions of course without buying whole sale into the many-layered abstraction that is a web framework or something. This question becomes more important when you aren't just updating a database though. If you're writing some novel method with a very detailed algorithm, over abstraction through OOP can really obscure the algorithm. In such a case, I try to identify logical tangents within the algorithm, and prune/abstract them away into some property or function call, but retain a single function for the main algorithm itself. The main algorithm gets its definition moved to the base class, and the logical tangents get some kind of stub/virtual method thingy in the base class so that they have to be defined by subclasses. The more nested tangents are frequently where detailed differences between use cases emerge, which makes logical sense. It's not just that it's abstract, but the logic is categorically separated. It's a very general pattern supported by many languages, so you see it all over the place. That organization and consistency in itself helps you to understand new code. In that way, it also becomes a kind of "idiom" which in a sense is one more layer of abstraction, helping you to manage complexity. As a counter of that, you see code where `a + x * y - b` becomes self.minus(self.xy_add(a), b). More abstract, but not more logical; not categorically separating; not conforming to common idioms; obscuring the algorithm; and so on... And then there is performance! Let's not talk about the performance of runtime abstractions. ------ Pxtl Every Line Of Business codebase I've worked on has been the worst "there I fixed it" copypasta spaghetti, and has never made it to the point where "maybe we shouldn't add a parameter to this existing, cleanly abstracted method to handle this new similar-but-distinct use-case" was anywhere near my radar for abstraction. I would _love_ to have developers where my problem was "maybe you piggybacked on existing code _too much_ , in this case you should've split out your own function". ~~~ mrfredward The business codebase I'm working on now was written by OOP crazy people who thought inheritance was the solution to every line of duplicated code. When they hit roadblocks, they filled the base class with things like if(this.GetType() == typeof(DerivedClass1)){... I would do anything to have the duplication instead. ~~~ isbvhodnvemrwvn Then the very same people learn that inheritance bad, composition good, and they'll create abstractions with no meaning on their own, which call 10 vague other abstractions (but hey, no inheritance!). Figuring out what happens there is even worse than with inheritance. Some people grow out of it, fortunately (mostly after having to deal with shit like that once or twice). ~~~ mannykannot > ...they'll create abstractions with no meaning on their own... As if that doesn't happen with inheritance! The dark pattern is using inheritance as an alternatve way of implementing composition. Anyone who thinks that "inheritance bad, composition good" is the proper response to this is probably as confused about the issue as those making the mistake in the first place. To be clear, you are clearly not making that claim yourself, but you are invoking it to make a straw man argument. ------ leto_ii As I gain more and more experience (I would now call myself more or less a mid-level developer), I find that the distinction that matters is not abstraction vs duplication, but the one between developer mindsets. I have many times met/worked with people who think the main task of the developer is to 'get shit done'. Regardless of their level of experience, these developers will churn out code and close tickets quite fast, with very little regard for abstraction, design, code reuse etc. Conversely, the approach that I feel more and more is the correct one is to treat development as primarily a mental task. Something that you first think about for a while and try to design a little. The actual typing will in this case be a secondary activity. Of course, this doesn't mean you shouldn't iterate on your design if during execution problems come up. Just that the 'thinking' part should come before the 'doing'. My feeling is that with this second approach the abstraction/duplication trade-off will not matter so much anymore. With enough experience you will figure out what you can duplicate and what you can design. And when you design you will develop an understanding of how far you should go. Approaching development as a task of simple execution I think inevitably leads to illegible spaghetti down the line. ~~~ Tainnor I agree that many issues with bad code could really be avoided by first thinking about the solution a bit, of which the code is just an expression. I'm not advocating weeks of architecture astronauting without code feedback - because practical considerations (e.g. the compiler can't deal with this kind of code due to some limitations) matter - but some people seem overeager to just start writing some code "and see what happens". ------ nfw2 When considering whether some abstraction is "right" or "wrong", another important thing to consider is how cleanly the abstraction fits into a mental model of how the program works. Good abstractions provide value outside of removing duplication. They help us reason about a program by providing compression of logical concepts. Consider some helper function: "convertSnakeToCamelCase." This abstraction would take a string, do some operations on it, and return another string. It is easy to understand what the input and output is without having to think about these operations. This abstraction provides a benefit for anyone having to think about the program because it reduces the amount of concepts the reader has to parse from N (where N is the number of operations) to 1. This is helpful because people have limited mental bandwidth and can only reason with a finite number of concepts at any given time. Consider a different helper function: “processDataPayload.” This function takes data in some arbitrary complex shape and returns data in some arbitrary complex shape. The abstraction effectively communicates nothing to the reader, and it is actively unhelpful because it forces that person to follow a reference, remember all the details of what that function does, and substitute those details into the original function. Trying to find the conceptual boundaries that make the program easiest to reason about IMO is more of an art than a science and difficult to govern with hard and fast rules. ~~~ jasonhansel Agreed. I also think it's important to create abstractions that provide guarantees and/or maintain invariants. That way, your abstractions actually help you be more confident that your code is correct. The point of abstraction isn't per se to reduce duplication--it's to make your code more straightforward and to make errors more obvious. ------ pierrebai Counter: Refactoring is far, far, far cheaper than duplication or wrong abstraction. Duplication means you lose the wisdom that was gained when the abstraction was written. It means that any bug or weird cases will now only be fixed in one place and stay incorrect for all the places you duplicated the code. About the rule of three: I personally extract functions for single-use cases all the time. The goal is to make the caller be as close to pseudo-code as possible. Then if a slightly different case comes up, I will write the slightly different case as another function right next to the original one. Otherwise, the fact that you have multiple similar cases will be lost. ~~~ jonahx Counter-counter: Refactoring is by far the most expensive and error prone activity in programming. It can also be one of the most valuable. But unless it's trivial, it's the most mentally arduous and time-consuming work you do as a programmer. ~~~ jasonhansel Refactoring is only error prone if you don't have integration tests. The advantage of extensive integration testing is that you can relentlessly refactor without fear of breaking things. ~~~ jonahx I'd much rather have them than not, but don't fool yourself into thinking you can refactor without any fear because you have integration tests. No matter how many you have, they'll only be testing a tiny fraction of your possible code paths. ------ seanalltogether This quote from John Carmack speaks very succinctly to the problems that many abstractions in a code base can cause, and it's a constant reminder for me when building out business logic. > "A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to > programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may > execute in." [https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functiona...](https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_programming_in_C.php) ~~~ hackinthebochs But abstractions reduce possible state and allows you to specify that state in obvious ways, e.g. on function parameters. Do not underestimate the power of functional boundaries. ~~~ ben509 They also tend to impose a degree of discipline. I've often found myself wanting to shove a parameter in somewhere and realized I didn't _need_ the damned thing. ------ ragnese I can't help but wonder if we're sometimes using the wrong words for things. In this discussion we keep talking about "code duplication" and "abstraction" hand-in-hand, but I think they're almost orthogonal concepts, at least as I think of them. Seeing the same code almost copy-and-pasted in a few places might call for some code-deduplication. But that's not necessarily a new "abstraction" in my eyes. It may be, but it also may not be. I'm struggling to think of a specific example because I fully intended to go to bed before arriving here... But as a really stupid example, let's say you have `val a = x + x + x` and `val b = y + y + y` and `val c = z + z + z` in your code. If you write a new function like `fun addThreeTimes(i) = i + i + i`, I don't see that as a new abstraction at all. If, however, you invent multiplication, _now_ you're at a new abstraction! `val a = x * 3; val b = y * 3`, etc. "Abstraction" to me is about thinking at a different semantic level, not about avoiding copy and paste. Does this resonate with anyone else? Am I missing the point? ~~~ MaulingMonkey They're theoretically orthogonal but practically not. You can deduplicate code without abstraction per se, but the result is generally unreadable and unmaintainable. As such, all reasonable code deduplication relies upon abstractions. However, not all abstractions involve code deduplication, and may instead have other goals (such as making it easier to reason about local state, invariants, etc.) > If you write a new function like `fun addThreeTimes(i) = i + i + i`, I don't > see that as a new abstraction at all. If you only call it once, it's not code deduplication either. What differentiates addThreeTimes(i) from sqrt(x) or average(x,y) or pow(x,y) or multiply(x,y)? Not how many call sites it has, nor the presence of a dedicated operator to the function in the language. Instead, I'd say: the function's reusability, composability, commonness, ... or to put it another way: addThreeTimes is an "abstraction" \- it's just a poor garbage unreusable unremarkable unrememberable abstraction with no expressive power. However, poor abstractions aren't the only result of overeager code deduplication. Sometimes you end up with "good" abstractions misapplied to the wrong situations - e.g. they solve issues your current problem doesn't actually have. As an example, turning your list of game entities into a list of (id, aabb_f32) tuples might be exactly what you want for a renderer culling or broad phase physics pass - but completely counterproductive for implementing the gameplay logic of a turn based game! If you've already got a list of tuples, you've a few choices: 1\. Modify the tuple (add tile position information that's useless to the renderer/physics, muddying the abstraction) 2\. De-abstract (e.g. perhaps change several function signatures to pass in the original entity list instead of the AABB list) 3\. Re-abstract (perhaps your gameplay logic should take something else that accounts for things like the fog of war instead of a raw list of entities?) 4\. ??? ~~~ ragnese > What differentiates addThreeTimes(i) from sqrt(x) or average(x,y) or > pow(x,y) or multiply(x,y)? Not how many call sites it has, nor the presence > of a dedicated operator to the function in the language. Instead, I'd say: > the function's reusability, composability, commonness, ... or to put it > another way: addThreeTimes is an "abstraction" \- it's just a poor garbage > unreusable unremarkable unrememberable abstraction with no expressive power. I agree that call sites or presence of language operators is not the defining distinction here. But I disagree that reusability, composability, or commonness (is that not "call sites"?) are somehow defining features of an abstraction, either. Obviously, those are good qualities for code to have, but that's not related to what I'm thinking about. The difference in my example is specific to the ladder of abstraction from addition to multiplication. When I was taught multiplication in early grade school, I was taught it as basically just being another way to write addition. When I first learned it, I would do exercises that involved taking an expression like "3 * 5" and translating it to "3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3" and then evaluating that. However, after time, I've stopped thinking about multiplication as addition. In my mind, I just think of multiplication as its own thing. I've fully internalize the "abstraction" because I don't even think about addition anymore when I see multiplication. So, when we take a Year, Make, Model, and Color and group them together and call it "Car", we're making an abstraction and it has little to do with code duplication. It has much more to do with wanting to think about higher-order constructs. You and I agree here, as per your first paragraph. If I have some kind of rendering engine and I find myself often rotating, then shifting a shape, I can write a `rotateThenShift(Shape, angle, distance) -> Shape` function and not feel like I've abstracted anything. I'm still "talking" about a shape and manually moving it around. Even if I just rename that function to `foobinate(Shape, angle, distance)`, I feel like I'm closer (but not quite) to a new level of abstraction because now I'm talking about some higher-order concept in my domain (assuming "foobinate" would be some kind of term from geometry that a domain expert might know). All other points about good or bad abstractions apply. I just don't think every single function we write is a new abstraction. ~~~ MaulingMonkey > commonness (is that not "call sites"?) I realize it's been 8 days, but I've mulled over the distinction and figured out the point I'm trying to make - and it's a matter of concept reuse vs code reuse. I might write a once-off, project specific, completely nonreusable function, with exactly one call site, but it still might be named after and based off of reusable _concepts_. A concrete example that comes to mind: I often write a "main" function, even in scripting languages that don't require it. This lets me place the core logic at the start of the script for ease-of-reading/browsing _without_ having all it's dependency functions defined yet. I then invoke this main function exactly once, at the bottom of the script. This is clearly not code reuse nor code deduplication - but it _is_ concept reuse, the concept being "the main entry point of an executable process." I might write a mathematical function like "abs" or "distance" as a quick local lambda function without intending to reuse it as well. I might later refactor to reuse/deduplicate that code by moving it into a common shared library of some sort. I might then later undo that refactoring to make a script nice and self-contained / standalone / decoupled / to shield it from upstream version churn / to improve build times / ??? > multiplication If you'd only used multiplication exactly once, it wouldn't have had much staying power as a useful abstraction. That it's a repeating, common, reusable pattern that can be useful in your day to day life is part of what makes it a useful abstraction worth internalizing. ------ adrianmonk Two questions (genuine, not rhetorical): (1) How much of this is because it's _actually hard_ to back out of the wrong abstraction and pivot to the correct one, and how much of it is other causes? The article hints at this with, "Programmer B feels honor-bound to retain the existing abstraction." Why do they feel this way, and is the feeling legitimate? Do they lack the deep understanding to make the change, or are they not rewarded for it, or are they unwilling to take ownership, or is it some other reason? I could see it going either way, but the point is to understand whether you're really stuck with that abstraction or not. (2) How much of the wrong abstraction is because people lack up front information to be able to know what the right abstraction is, and how much of it is because choosing good abstractions (in general and specifically ones that are resilient in the face of changing requirements) is a skill that takes work/time/experience/etc. to develop? If it's due to being unable to predict the future, then it makes sense to avoid abstractions. If it's due to not being as good as you could be at creating abstractions, then maybe improving your ability to do so would allow a third option: instead of choosing between duplication and a bad abstraction, maybe you can choose a good abstraction. ~~~ zbentley > Why do they feel this way, and is the feeling legitimate? In my experience, it's because the amount of diff (red or green) in a change request is--consciously or subconsciously--correlated with risk. Even though we killed SLoC as a productivity metric years ago, the idea that "change/risk is proportional to diff size" is still pervasive. I'm totally into YAGNI/"code volume is liability" school of thought. But equating _change_ volume with liability is a subtly different and very harmful pattern. Adding a single conditional inside your typical 1200 line mixed-concern business-critical horrorshow function may assume a much greater liability (liability as in bug risk and liability as in risk/difficulty of future changes) than e.g. deleting a bunch of unused branches, or doing a function- extraction refactor pass. Standard "change one thing at a time" good engineering practices still apply of course. ------ runald For something that argues against bad abstractions, the article sure is lacking in concrete examples and makes a point in abstract. A lot of people will likely misinterpret or get the idea that abstraction is only done for duplicated code (DRY as some people would call it). I think the wrong/bad "abstractions" here mostly refers to abstraction that was made over common code that is very specific in a context and is very susceptible to domain changes. But there are a lot of other kinds of abstraction aside from DRY. There are abstractions made to reduce clutter and hide implementation detail and will likely be used only once. There are also abstraction that are more general and aren't coupled to the domain. These abstractions are more reusable and composable, and are immune to domain changes such as the step 6 in the article. Some people would find these kinds of abstractions harder to digest, but I personally consider these kinds of abstractions as extensions to the standard library, or even additions to the vocabulary of the programming language. Note that I don't claim that general abstractions are necessarily better, since the generality can be made to the extreme and we'd have monads for breakfast. All in all, I agree with the article, except that it is only referring to one kind of abstraction, although I hesitate to call it as such. ------ goto11 I'm skeptical because it is really easy to un-share code by copying it into multiple places but it is very hard to unify duplicated code. So I prefer to err on the side of sharing. But yes, you should be ready to change sharing into duplication if you realize the code is just "accidentally similar" and need to evolve in separate directions. In practice I have seen a lot more pain due to duplicate code compared to the issue of over-abstracting code, because the latter is much easier to fix. ~~~ joeframbach On the other hand, it's really difficult to know who is using that shared code. If you make an innocuous change in a shared method, it could affect someone else you don't know. ~~~ bcrosby95 It's a million times easier than figuring out if those minor differences in duplicate code are accidental or on purpose. As bad as a flag-laden method might be, you know the intent of all callers. ------ ricksharp The mistake is creating an abstraction because of seeing duplication. DRY is not a good guiding principle. It is an anti-principle. Abstractions should only be created when they have a clear purpose and create a simpler architecture by encapsulating a single concern. The reality is that all code is duplication. The reason we write code is because it is the most concise language to specify the intended goal _in the current context_. What is unique is not the code that we are writing. The unique part is the code in the current context and each level of abstraction separates the context from the implementation - so that abstraction must be beneficial in organizing the overall solution into individual logical components of singular concern. ------ random3 This is so true, but so shallow too. I think the big mistake is to treat the code as "the main thing" when in reality it's just a model (a golem) mimicking some "other thing" We're missing an entire set of code characterizations. Yes we have a "pattern language" but there's not much to characterize it structurally wrt "code distance" from one part of the code to the other (e.g. in call stack depth as well as in breadth). And again all of this needs to happen wrt the "abstraction" not the code itself. Having 10 methods 90% duplicated in a single file with 10% pecent difference is many times better than trying to abstract it. Having the same "unit conversion" function duplicated in 3 parts of the code can be disastrous. These two examples are very easy to see and understand, but in reality you're always in a continuous state in between. And "code smells" like passing too many parameters or doing "blast radius" for certain code changes are only watching for side-effects of a missing "code theory". An interesting book on the topic is "Your code as a crime scene". The bottom line is we're trying to fix these problems over and over again without having a good understanding of what the real problem is and this leads to too many rules too easy to misinterpret unless you are already a "senior artist" ~~~ ijidak > Having the same "unit conversion" function duplicated in 3 parts of the code > can be disastrous. This. I feel like it's really about cognitive load to remember and recognize the differences. Duplication in 3 distant files, places a heavy load on the developer to: 1\. Discover the duplication 2\. To grasp the reason for the differences in the 3 different locations. 3\. Remember these things Whereas when the duplication is in the SAME file, #1, #2, and #3 can become very manageable cognitively. Now the question changes to.. Is the cognitive load of dealing with the different special cases in a single de-duplicated method GREATER than simply leaving them in separate methods? Often the answer is duplication WITHIN a file is less of a cognitive load. Whereas duplication ACROSS files is a heavy cognitive load. Minimizing cognitive load minimizes mistakes. And minimizes developer fatigue. Thus boosting productivity. At least, that's my development philosophy, even though I've never seen it in a design pattern or a book. It just seems to make sense. ------ bob1029 This whole thing exists on a normalized/de-normalized spectrum. The problem is that both ends have pros/cons. On the normalized side, you have the benefit of single-point-of-touch and enforcement of a standard implementation. This can make code maintenance easier if used in the correct places. It can make code maintenance a living nightmare if you try to normalize too many contexts into one method. If you find yourself 10 layers deep in a conditional statement trying to determine specific context, you may be better off with some degree of de-normalization (duplication). On the de-normalized side, you have the benefit of specific, scoped implementations. Models and logic pertain more specifically to a particular domain or function. This can make reasoning with complex logic much easier as you are able to deal with specific business processes in isolation. You will likely see fewer conditionals in de-normalized codesites. Obvious downsides are that if you need to fix a bug with some piece of logic and 100 different features implement that separately, you can wind up with a nasty code maintenance session. I find that a careful combination of both of these ideas results in the most ideal application. Stateless common code abstractions which cross-cut stateful, feature-specific code abstractions seems to be the Goldilocks for our most complicated software. ------ brandonmenc Junior programmers duplicate everything. Intermediate programmers try to abstract away absolutely every line that occurs more than once. Expert programmers know when to abstract and when to just let it be and duplicate. ------ cjfd If there is one single article about programming that I hate it is this one. It is completely the wrong message. One should instead be very eager to eliminate duplication. To avoid the pitfalls that the article notes one should create abstractions that are the minimal ones required to remove the duplication to avoid over-engineering. Also one should keep improving the abstractions. That way one can turn the abstraction that turned out to be wrong into the right one. It is the attitude of constant improvement that will make one succeed as opposed to the attitude of fear of changing something that this article seems to encourage. When one does things one learns. When one is afraid to try things everything will just calcify until it is no longer possible to add any new features. What one does need to make the refactoring work is automated tests. ~~~ Ensorceled In 30 years, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've encountered projects that were in trouble because there was copy/pasted code everywhere and the team was not abstracting out of fear of breaking the existing code. What I have encountered is dozens of projects that had essentially ground to a halt because of numerous deeply, and incorrectly, abstracted systems, modules and libraries. Correcting projects in this state has almost always been refactoring into fewer abstractions; less complex, more cohesive and less coupling. ~~~ cjfd Actually, I have in fact seen this. I worked at a place where this copy and paste programming actually lead to functions that are many thousands of lines long and are full of duplication and very deeply nested. At some point a file was split because the compiler would not handle such a large file (!). Very difficult to change anything. And also, refactoring by removing abstraction is fine as well. The thing that is not fine is having problems and doing nothing about them. To me it seem that is what the article ultimately encourages to do. ------ scrozart DRY gets abused regularly in my experience. It doesn't stop at method/class abstractions either; I've seen entire microservices & plugins developed to ensure each app doesn't have that one chunk of auth code, for instance, even though they each may have subtly different requirements (those extra params again). The logical end to this sort of thing is infinitely flexible/generic multipurpose code, when the solution is really, probably increased specificity. DRY is probably the lowest-hanging fruit for practices/patterns, and I think this leads to a disproportionate focus on it. ~~~ hesdeadjim It’s also easy compared to solving new problems, so it can be an emotionally safe way of feeling productive. Failure is difficult to measure until the abstraction falls flat on its face months later, at which point it can be chalked up to the demons of “changing requirements”. ~~~ zbentley That is a very, very important point; well put. The "of course it sucks: changing requirements!" boogeyman means one of two things: "the code was written to do the wrong thing because requirements changed/weren't communicated" or "the code was _hard to change_ when it needed to do a new thing". Figuring out which of those two is in play is very important. ------ jack_h I would say that if developers are hacking on an abstraction that is ill- suited to the task until the code base is a nightmare, they will take this advice and duplicate code until it's a nightmare. The fact of the matter is every line of code that is written has an associated cost. Developers all too often pay that cost by incurring technical debt. ------ haolez That's mostly how I matured as a developer: I find myself abstracting less and writing less code today than I did 10 years ago, but I'm more productive today, my code is cheaper to maintain and has fewer bugs. Sometimes, I will literally copy paste a small amount of logic just to avoid making a future reader of this code to keep hunting around where the business logic is actually implemented. "It's right here, my dear future reader!". Or maybe I was just a really bad programmer 10 years go :) ------ gm This advice just _feels_ very wrong. After thinking about it and seeing the other comments, some remarks: 1) It's fine to go back and duplicate code after you correct the abstraction. But it should be the _first_ phase in doing a larger pass to refactor code to fit the current business requirements. If you forgo the _second_ step, which should be to search for suitable abstractions again, you are absolutely guaranteed to be left with shit code that breaks in this situation, but not that other one, and no one knows why. I would absolutely only duplicate code as the prequel to deduplicating it again with updated abstractions. 2) If you do any of this without thorough unit tests you're insane. Keep the wrongly-abstracted code unless you have time to thoroughly fix the mess you will have made when you duplicate code again and introduce bugs (you're human, after all). 2a) If you are going to do this and there are no unit tests, create those unit tests before you touch the code initially (before the duplication). 3) Some of the comments saying you should wait until you implement something two or three times before creating an abstraction seem like comp sci 101 rules of thumb. It's way too simplistic a rule, way too general. Prematurely abstracted (haha!). The type of project and the type of company/industry will tell you what the right tradeoff is. That is all. ~~~ haolez You are assuming that the code is a moving target. Not every software project behaves that way. Sometimes, the software gets done as is. ~~~ gm In that case, then the original problem (incorrect abstraction) does not exist, or at least does not get worse over time, and thus does not need fixing. ------ bcrosby95 I find it interesting that comments on these articles mainly discuss 1 aspect about it. But rarely this part: > Don't get trapped by the sunk cost fallacy. In my experience, yes, programmers are hesitant to throw out an abstraction. Why not work to change this, rather than telling people not to abstract? ~~~ ben509 I don't think it's a sunk cost fallacy. I think the hesitation is more for social reasons, often not wanting to do a big pull request that's going to be scrutinized. ~~~ Tainnor "Big pull requests" that are unannounced are always problematic because who wants to be the person saying "all of this work you've done is wrong"? In such situations, it's good to get buy-in from other people before attempting to do such a thing. Make a proposal for a big change and discuss it. There's still a chance that, in the implementation it doesn't work as nicely as believed initially, but at least now it's less likely that the idea will be rejected wholesale during code review. ------ preommr I strongly dislike this article because the title is much broader than most of the substance of the article. Advising not to overextend an abstraction is inarguable. The actual title "Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction", and the thing that people will really discuss, is a loaded statement that's going to need a lot of caveats. ------ klyrs I use DRY in two ways. The first is that I'm happy to make 2 or 3 copies of a snippet before promoting that to a new function. The second is when I find a bug in a duplicated snippet. I'll mend the snippet and its duplicates, once or twice before promoting it to a function. In the rarer (in my line of work) instance that a common snippet gets used with several intrusive variations, I usually document the pattern. It's tempting to use templates, lambda functions, closures, coroutines, etc but far simpler to duplicate the code. But again, if a bug (or refactor) crops up and I need to fix it in many places, then I'll spend some time thinking about abstraction and weigh the options with the benefit of hindsight. ------ crazygringo Another tip is: if you're duplicating, and they're not lines of code that are visually obviously next to each other, then leave a comment next to both instances mentioning the existence of the other. There's nothing inherently wrong with duplication, except that if you change or fix a bug in one, you need to not forget about the other. Creating a single function solves this... but at the potential cost of creating the wrong abstraction. When you're at only 1 or 2 extra instances of the code, just maintaining a "pointer" to the other case(s) with a comment serves the same purpose. (Of course, this requires discipline to always include the comments, and to always follow them when making a change.) ~~~ stormdennis Would the risk forgetting to update the comments not be a reason for creating a wrapper method that handled calls to both and contained the relevant advice? ------ gorgoiler Brilliant insight. Always remember: (1) make it work, (2) make it right, (3) make it fast. 80% of projects get scrapped in between (1) and (2) because you end up realizing you wanted something completely different anyway. ~~~ willcipriano > (1) make it work, (2) make it right, (3) make it fast. I've always disagreed with this. In my view you should make it a habit to write optimized code. This isn't agonizing over minor implementation details but keeping in mind the time complexity of whatever you are writing and working towards a optimal solution from the start. You should know what abstractions in your language are expensive and avoid them. You should know roughly the purpose of a database table you create and add the indexes that make sense even if you don't intend to use them right away. You should know that thousands of method lookups in a tight loop will be slow. You should have a feel for "this is a problem someone else probably solved, is there a optimal implementation I can find somewhere?". You should know when you use a value often and cache it to start with. Over time the gap between writing unoptimized and mostly optimized code gets smaller and smaller just like practice improves any skill. ~~~ sagichmal > In my view you should make it a habit to write optimized code. It depends on your domain. If you're writing for embedded, or games, or other things where performance is table stakes, then sure. If you're writing code to meet (always changing) business requirements in a team with other people, writing optimized code first is actively harmful. It inhibits understandability and maintainability, which are the most important virtues of this type of programming. And this is true even if performance is important: optimizations, i.e. any implementation other than the most obvious and idiomatic, must always be justified with profiling. ~~~ Tainnor You're mostly right, but even in typical LOB applications, there are some low- hanging fruits you should really pay attention to. One common example are N+1 queries. And if you _do_ find yourself writing an algorithm (something which happens more rarely in LOB applications, but can still happen occasionally), it's probably still good to create algorithms that are of a lower complexity class, provided they are not that much harder to understand or don't have other significant drawbacks. I remember that I once accidentally created an algorithm with a complexity of O(n!). ------ thinkloop A related problem: duplication is not equality. If two things happen to be the same right now, it doesn't mean they are intrinsically the same thing. If you have multiple products selling for $59.99 they shouldn't share a function to generate the "duplicate" price. Abstractions needs to be driven by conceptual equivalence, not value equivalence, where duplication is a good hint for a potential candidate of abstraction, but not the complete answer alone. ------ allenu In a large organization, the other thing you notice with trying to fix duplicated code is, if you take on refactoring it all, you are now responsible to make sure everything still works AND that you do not inhibit any future work. You are now responsible for more than you may have bargained for. Coming up with the right abstraction takes some predicting of future use- cases. It's more than just refactoring work to put it all in one place. ------ SkyPuncher I think there's a big cultural challenge with adopting duplication. It goes against most people's career growth objectives. Being able to effectively create clean, re-usable abstractions is a measure of being a "senior" engineer at many places. In other words, to be viewed as senior, you need to be able to effectively write abstraction frequently. It's hard to measure an abstraction in the moment, so a lot of people assume that the senior simply knows better. I find this extends to a lot of programming. Seniors will often use unnecessary tricks or paradigms simply because they can. It can make it extremely difficult for junior developers to grok code. Often this re-enforces seniority. "If only the seniors can work on a section of code, then they are senior". Likewise, there are so many books on crazy architectures and patterns. It's really neat to understand, but I've determined those books are pretty much self-serving. \---- I've found that my work is often far more limited by the domain/business logic than any sort of programming logic. I'll happily write code that looks really basic - because I know ANYBODY can come in and work with that code. If I write code that a junior needs to ask me questions like "what is this pattern?" or "what does this mean?", I've written bad code. \----- With all that being said, every single job interview I've ever had expects me to write code at the level of complexity that my title will be at. They'd much rather see me build some sort of abstract/brittle concept than using some constants and switch statements. The prior looks cool, the latter looks normal. ~~~ leto_ii > I think there's a big cultural challenge with adopting duplication. It goes > against most people's career growth objectives. My experience is the complete opposite :D. What I've noticed is that the people who 'deliver' quickly (without much regard for what might be called code quality) and fulfill business requirements without much questioning are perceived as more valuable. > I've found that my work is often far more limited by the domain/business > logic than any sort of programming logic. I broadly agree with this statement. However, just like a good carpenter knows how to properly build a bookcase, a table, a roof etc. a good developer should understand the programming logic and know how to apply it. Business requirements need to be fulfilled, but it's up to us to decide how to do that. More so, I think it's up to us to push back when we feel business requirements don't make sense from a technical point of view, or even from a business point of view. ------ zarathustreal I’ve seen this “hot take” a few times before and even see developers that I would have considered very good agree with it. Consider that all code is computation, this is the point of a computer: to compute. Consider that abstraction doesn’t seem valuable -to you- for a multitude of reasons. Perhaps you’re using a flawed paradigm that emphasizes objects over computation. This would obviously mean abstraction -increases- the difficulty of reasoning about your code. Perhaps you don’t have a mental map of appropriate abstractions due to a lack of education or knowledge gap, this could lead you down the path of creating abstractions which reduce duplicate characters or lines of text but are not logically sound (“leaky abstractions.”) All of these things come together in a modern “enterprise” software environment in just the right way such that abstraction starts to seem like a bad idea. Do not fall into this line of thinking. Study functional programming. Study algebraic structures. Eventually the computer science will start to make sense. ------ hota_mazi > prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction Such a strange advice. If you're able to recognize the wrong abstraction right away, surely you would not use it, right? ~~~ allenu I think the intent was to communicate that abstractions aren't always right. Some people might think that because there's duplicate code and that the abstracted code maps to the duplicated code 1 to 1 and leads to fewer lines in total, it's a good abstraction, not realizing that there are costs to doing this that may not be aware of. ------ layer8 The main takeaway from the article is that abstractions which have become inadequate should be corrected (removed and/or replaced by adequate ones) as soon as possible. A corollary is that abstractions should be designed such that they can be replaced or removed without too much difficulty. A common problem in legacy code bases is not just that they contain many inadequate abstractions, but that the abstractions are entangled with each other such that changing one requires changing a dozen others. You start pulling at one end and eventually realize that it’s all one large Gordian knot. One thing that I learned the hard way over the years is to design abstractions as loosely coupled and as independent from each other as possible. Then it becomes more practical to replace them when needed. ------ hackinthebochs I couldn't disagree more. There is no such thing as abstracting too early (this does not go for structural abstractions like factories, singletons, etc). The best code is code you don't have to read because of strong, well- named functional boundaries. ------ naringas sometimes it's better to copy and paste some code only to make each copy diverge more and more over time (somewhat like a starting template) as opposed to introduction an abstraction to generalize some slightly different behaviors only to use said abstraction twice. this makes even more sense when the code will live on in different programs there's a point when incurring the cognitive overhead costs of the abstraction become worthwhile, probably after the 3rd time. but my point is that it's also important to consider that the abstraction introduces some coupling between the parts of the code. ~~~ rightbyte I find it easier to read long functions of code than jumping around in helper functions or abstractions. Especially if I am not familiar with the code base and don't know common functions by heart. ------ memexy > Re-introduce duplication by inlining the abstracted code back into every > caller. Ideally this type of workflow would be supported by the code editor. I've done this manually a few times and it's not fun. ------ chiefalchemist Why not simply duplicate the abstraction, refactor as needed, and adjust the necessary caller(s)? Having to know, find and maintain the individual duplications feels dirty and its own way wrong. Choose your wrongs wisely? ------ kevsim Relevant post from earlier today [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735991](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735991) ------ ridaj Previously discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17578714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17578714) ~~~ arendtio I find that first comment particularly insightful. However, I am not sure about the order of state and coupling. To me it seems to depend on the language, as for functional languages, avoiding state is king and in object oriented environments, coupling could be a more important factor. ------ jbmsf One of the reasons duplication is used badly is that it is one of the easiest abstractions to recognize. One of the ways I've seen DRY go horribly wrong involves reusable code units evolving into shared dependencies that often interdepend in complex ways. Unfortunately, the problems of such a system are observed much later than the original code duplication and fewer people have the experience to see it coming. ------ adamkl Sandi mentions this during a talk she gave on refactoring a few years ago. [0] It’s a great little video for showing junior developers how a messy bit of code can be cleaned up with a few well chosen OOP patterns (and a set of unit tests to cover your ass). [0] [https://youtu.be/8bZh5LMaSmE](https://youtu.be/8bZh5LMaSmE) ------ vxNsr I want to thank everyone here, I’ve been stuck for about a week now on an issue that is entirely germane to this topic and the whole conversation here really helped me flesh out what was wrong and allowed me to understand a path forward. I’m honestly holding myself back from popping onto my computer right now to start working on it. ------ tarkin2 "With C you can shoot your own foot. With C++ you can blow your own leg off". I feel the same is true here. The abstraction may be right at the time of writing, yet further on it often becomes not only wrong, but a massive hindrance. With time and effort, hacky code and be worked into shape. An eventual wrong abstraction normally means a rewrite. ------ kolinko I wish this article was available two years ago when I tried to explain this to a bunch of juniors working for me... ~~~ nnutter “ Posted on January 20, 2016 by Sandi Metz.” ~~~ kolinko Damn, I wish I saw it back then :) ------ nbardy This has been one of the hardest fought lessons I’ve learned it my programming career, but also one of the most fruitful. I am to make my abstractions too late rather than too early. My rule of thumb tends to me copy things six to seven times before you try to build an abstraction for it. ------ worik Really this is stating the obvious. The social problem at step 6, 7, and 8 is a social and economic one. Having the time, resources, and skill to do a job properly is very important. But there are social and economic pressures to "just get it done". This is a specific formulation of a general problem. ------ kureikain I think one of the cool thing about pattern matching or language(In my case, it's Elixir) that support function operator is we can have same method with different argument sigunatures. So we don't have to duplicate or inherit whatever and still share some common method. ------ why-el Rob Pike discusses similar points in this section of his talk on Go Proverbs [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAAkCSZUG1c&t=9m28s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAAkCSZUG1c&t=9m28s). ------ Xlurker I'd rather ctrl-f and change code in multiple places than deal with abstraction hell. ------ tomphoolery This again?? ;) I love this post. A lot of wasted hours were spent in the past trying to use abstractions that no longer made sense, but Sandi encouraged me to go back and rethink a lot of that and now my code is way easier to read. Thanks Sandi! ------ recroad Programmer B in Step 6 should have used SOLID and refactored to extend the module (or something similar). This is strawman argument which has little to do with the "wrong" abstraction and everything to do with poor design choices. ------ ninetax What are people's recommendations on books on how and when to create the right abstractions? Last year I read Zach Tellman's _Elements of Clojure_ and really loved the parts that touched on the subject of abstraction. ------ dfischer Reminds me of this discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12120752](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12120752) (John Carmack on inlined code). ------ pps43 Related to [http://yosefk.com/blog/redundancy-vs-dependencies-which- is-w...](http://yosefk.com/blog/redundancy-vs-dependencies-which-is- worse.html) ------ kuharich Prior comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17578714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17578714) ------ gumby Early de duplication is the equivalent of early optimization: a bad idea that boxes you in. Duplicate code is a sign that there _could_ be a generalization missing. ------ neetrain I think the term "wrong" causes all the misunderstandings. It sounds like the abstraction was wrong _in the first place_. Can it be called "rotten" abstraction? ------ avodonosov > they alter the code to take a parameter, and then add logic to conditionally > do the right thing based on the value of that parameter But that's a textbook example of bad code, competent coders don't do this. Update: for example see Thinking Forth chapter "Factoring Techniques", around the tip "Don’t pass control flags downward.". Page 174 in the onscreen PDF downloadable from sourceforge. And there is no need for duplication. The bigger function can be split into several parts so that instead of one call with flag everyone calls needed set of smaller functions. ~~~ zbentley > that's a textbook example of bad code, competent coders don't do this. That's reductive and dismissive. There's a ton of subtlety in even defining the terms for that "best practice". What counts as a control flag versus a necessary choice that must be made by callers? Are you still passing control flags if you combine them into a settings object? What if you use a builder pattern to configure flags before invoking the business logic--is that better/worse/the same? What if you capture settings inside a closure and pass that around as a callback? How far "downward" is too far? How far is not far enough (e.g. all callers are inlining every decision point)? The answer to all of those is, of course, "it depends on a lot of things". And that's before you even get into the reality (which a sibling comment pointed out) that even if we grant that this is inherently bad code, that doesn't imply anything about the competence of the coder--some folks aren't put in positions where they can do a good job. Unrelated aside: Thinking Forth is an excellent book! Easy to jump into/out of in a "bite size" way, applicable to all sorts of programming, not just Forth programming. ------ kristo There should be a code tool to re-inline code from an abstraction ------ djhaskin987 Mods this article is old, should be labeled 2016. ------ ulisesrmzroche “Premature optimization is the root of all evil” ------ amelius A manager once asked me: please reuse as much code as you possibly can. This reminded me of that. ------ sheeshkebab I’m not sure why this is #1... but since it is, both of these - duplication and wrong abstractions - are otherwise known as technical debt. ~~~ dasil003 Not necessarily. Technical debt is when you do something quick and dirty to get a feature out in the short-term knowing that it won't be maintainable, scalable, etc, but you do it anyway with the expectation that you'll fix it later. Some duplication and wrong abstractions are caused by this, but definitely not all. ~~~ hrhrhrd No, technical debt is a very general category that includes deliberate hacks, structural flaws, and small mistake bugs. It's anything that over time will damage the code base, duplications and wrong abstractions being very much included in that ~~~ dasil003 You're welcome to your own definitions, but personally I keep bitrot, deferred maintenance, and "structural flaws" (which can be subjective and dependent on use cases and scale) out of the bucket of technical debt since it robs the metaphor of a defining aspect: intentionality. Debt is not something that happens passively as the world changes around you, it's something which you sign up for. ~~~ quinnirill If you unintentionally destroy property and have to pay for it, you’re in debt. We even have a concept of life debt. Some debt is intentional, some incidental. Most technical debt I’ve seen was not intentional, just a well meaning design that was created to serve a purpose that eventually outgrew it, and that’s when the interest started to pile up. And happening passively is exactly what it does, interest rates change, your ability to make downpayments change. All part of the very well functioning metaphor in this context.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
“Respect Explorer’s Heritage” - playhard http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/30/we-need-an-invert-selection-button/ ====== doctorwho If the design turns out to be a Microsoft blunder, it just opens the door for someone to build a better file explorer. The ability to do this has led to many great products in the past. The file explorer in Windows is optional. It's there. It's free. Use it. Or don't.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Anonymous activists release PCAnywhere source code - VMG http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-threats/2012/02/07/anonymous-activists-release-pcanywhere-source-code-40094993/ ====== pwnwaffe Btw, one of the 0days is in ./pca32/trunk/Source/Servers/awhost32x/. ;)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Potentially catastrophic Category 5 Hurricane Willa nearing Mexico's coast - LinuxBender https://lite.cnn.io/en/article/h_9f7af5bdc1443dbed0e336355e5816d2 ====== jansan Land mass to the south: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFM1X0o2pnc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFM1X0o2pnc)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Bit Serial CPU - howerj https://github.com/howerj/bit-serial ====== howerj Hello HN, here is a project that I have recently finished, it is a _very_ niche CPU written in VHDL and verified to work on an [FPGA][]. It is a 16-bit [bit-serial][] CPU, which means the processor is incredibly slow taking 102 clock cycles to complete some instructions, the trade-off is that the CPU is very small, almost being free to implement in terms of floor space on the FPGA, the entire project takes just 73 slices, with the CPU itself taking 23 slices. The cross-compiler and the cross compiled program, a [Forth][] interpreter, are available at: <[https://github.com/howerj/bit- serial/blob/master/bit.fth](https://github.com/howerj/bit- serial/blob/master/bit.fth)> It compiles down to an image that uses just 4802 bytes (out of 16KiB). And a C simulator if you would like to try out the Forth interpreter but lack an FPGA to try things on is available at: <[https://github.com/howerj/bit- serial/blob/master/bit.c](https://github.com/howerj/bit- serial/blob/master/bit.c)> You can type: make run To build the C simulator and run it on a pre-compiled image. Typing 'words' and hitting return shows you a list of all defined functions. In all likeliness the project will not have that much utility to anyone, but I have wanted to make a bit-serial CPU after completing my previous FPGA project because the architecture is quite rare nowadays and might be something of a curiosity. [bit-serial]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit- serial_architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-serial_architecture) [Forth]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_$programming_language$) [FPGA]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field- programmable_gate_array](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field- programmable_gate_array) [VHDL]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL) ~~~ cellularmitosis Very cool! For those of us less versed in FPGA, do you have an idea of how many transistors would be required to build this CPU? I have long been curious about the minimum number of transistors needed to build the smallest "useful" CPU. ~~~ howerj I do not think I could give an accurate conversion between FPGA Slices and transistors myself, it is certainly small (23 slices) and processors with similar capabilities ran in thousands of transistors/tubes range. You should look into more esoteric processors such as Forth CPUs, other bit-serial CPUs, CPUs built around single instructions (such as SUBLEQ) and new CPUs built out of 7400 series parts. ------ rwmj This was a fun talk on the RISC-V SERV bit serial CPU: [https://diode.zone/videos/watch/0230a518-e207-4cf6-b5e2-69cc...](https://diode.zone/videos/watch/0230a518-e207-4cf6-b5e2-69cc09411013) ------ gumby Speaking of single bit ALUs the original connection machine design was for 1024 single-bit CPUs in a full crossbar. I don’t believe that architecture was actually built. ~~~ dazam CM1 had 65536 single bit processors. They were not connected in a crossbar, instead the chips that were the fundamental building block of the supercomputer each contained 16 of those bit serial processors and 4096 of those chips were connected in a 12 dimensional hypercube. The total dimension of the hypercube was 16 but the 16 on-chip processors had local routing. ------ retrac Clever! Were you inspired by the very early machines that used serial processing to save on the number of tubes? ~~~ rst There were a few bit-serial economy designs going into the transistor era -- the latest I'm aware of is the PDP-8/S (S for Serial) from 1967. If you want to build a really cheap machine and transistors are $1 each (closer to $8 current dollars after inflation), this is how you do it. [https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech- talk/semiconductors/devices/h...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech- talk/semiconductors/devices/how-much-did-early-transistors-cost) ~~~ userbinator The CDP1802 also uses a serial ALU: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to Build Habits to Lead a Better Life in 2015 - karangoeluw https://medium.com/@karan/exactly-how-to-build-habits-to-lead-a-better-life-in-2015-922714665e23 ====== xxjaba Good luck with your changes in 2015! I've also found that focusing on small changes can help quite a bit too when trying to change your habits. Want to lose weight? Try to find an easy way to cut 200 calories, like not putting sugar in your coffee in the morning. Once you have that down, you can move on to another small action. The small successes add up over time and the small wins keep you motivated over time. ~~~ karangoeluw Yup. This is exactly how I think everyone should approach new habits. ------ dang [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Large Hadron Collider scuttled by birdy baguette-bomber - amduser29 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/lhc_bread_bomb_dump_incident/ ====== JCThoughtscream Murphy loves French pastry, apparently. Loves it enough to share with multibillion dollar high-energy projects. ------ gfodor Does someone with a little more knowledge have any idea how a bird with a baguette could have access to this part of the machine? What is stopping rain, snow, random people, etc, from breaking things? ------ Dilpil I find it hard to believe that a project of this magnitude has so little fault tolerance. ~~~ dstorrs Are you kidding? This thing is miles across, operates at temperatures colder than space, and is _intended_ to cope with energy equivalent to two aircraft carriers ramming into each other at flank speed. If there's a problem, they can dump all that energy and contain it safely within a few seconds or less. You'll never have a system this powerful that can't be fouled up somehow...whether it's birds with bread or rats chewing the wires or just plain bad luck. But these guys have made the system safe and built it so they can go from "emergency shutdown" to "normal operations" in only three days. The LHC is an amazing piece of engineering with fantastically _good_ fault tolerance.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
You can't beat fake news with science communication - snaky https://www.theguardian.com/science/occams-corner/2018/aug/29/science-communication-fake-news ====== anoncoward111 Why shut down your blog? That's letting the trolls win. The world is something like 99% dog shit and 1% diamonds burried inside. The trolls comment on day 1. The real readers trickle in over the years.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
'Think of your family': China threatens European citizens over Xinjiang protests - hkmaxpro https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/17/think-of-your-family-china-threatens-european-citizens-over-xinjiang-protests ====== mfer Is this really a new thing for China? Reconditioning camps and treatment of people in the manners being talked about are something I read about years ago with other people groups. That being said... reading about this makes me sad. ------ mdorazio And so it seems that cold war tactics are still alive and well in China. This is the kind of story I would expect to read about happening in 1950s Berlin. ~~~ eznoonze Worse thing is: China always blames others for having 'cold war' mentality when in reality they are the one with hardcore cold war tactics all along. ~~~ CrackerNews It's a chicken and the egg problem. Both sides will use subterfuge and espionage against each other. They will counter with secret intelligence services or outright detainment camps and propaganda. One side won't give up when they can say that the other side is ready to exploit them. It has gotten to the point where the Chinese view the Uighurs as potential proxy agents and so they heavily track and watch them and employ propaganda and reeducation camps against them.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Beyond Bootstrap and Foundation: Frameworks you've never heard of - proksoup http://www.sitepoint.com/beyond-bootstrap-foundation-frameworks-never-heard/ ====== milla88 True. Definitely have never heard of them. Probably for good reasons. I gave flat-ui a try a few months ago, integration was a nightmare. These frameworks all look pretty good from the outside, I wonder if they have a good API too. Anyone with experience with them?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Correct Horse Battery Staple password generator - quantum5 https://correcthorse.pw/ ====== atoponce I audit web-based password generators as a hobby, and this one does well. What it does well on: The source code is open source licensed. Passwords are generated in the client, not on the server. The generator is random. The generator is cryptographically secure. The generator is unbiased. Mobile devices are supported. There are no JavaScript trackers loaded on the page. The site is not calling out to external resources without SRI. Unfortunately, by only choosing 4 random words, the security margin of the passphrase is 52 bits (13 bits per word). This is practical for a hobbyist password cracker to exhaust in an offline attack. The security would be better if 6 random words were chosen instead. Audit: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ucaqJ4U3X3nNEbAAa06i...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ucaqJ4U3X3nNEbAAa06igbBkITHaA98blftOwT8u0I4/edit?usp=sharing) ~~~ quantum5 Thank you for the audit! The default was chosen as 4 words due to usability concerns with longer passwords or more obscure words, but it is adjustable. The strength meter is yellow at 4 words to indicate the less-than-optimal entropy, but I felt it was better than turning a new user off by making it too hard to remember. But that's a decision I plan on revisiting. If you are security conscious, you can save a more secure default for yourself (in local storage, nothing is ever transmitted to a server). ~~~ atoponce No problem. I dig the project. Very cool. I would recommend the default be 6 words, and let people choose down to 4, but not lower. At last that way, users know what a "secure default" looks like. Granted, it breaks the four-word "correct horse battery staple" XKCD format, but Randall was in some error with that comic anyway. ------ CPLX Can someone explain to me why 1password doesn't have something like this built in? You can use words, or random/symbols, but not both. Which fails miserably every time you're faced with some sort of silly password requirement to have a symbol and a number and a capital or whatever. ~~~ daveoc64 Passphrases are easy for people to remember, but if you have a password manager, you're better off getting it to generate a 50+ character random password (including uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols). That should meet pretty much any password requirement, be virtually impossible to guess or brute force, and you won't have trouble remembering it (because you don't have to!). ~~~ asdkhadsj > you're better off getting it to generate a 50+ character random password > (including uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols). Lol I wish. Almost all of the important sites I use, like various bills and loans, use terrible password schemes. One even, until recently, enforced an 8 character limit! I think they raised it to 16 iirc. Oy. Hell, even the company I work for frequently fails my password generator settings. The arbitrary character requirements of my ~20 character password would sometimes not be satisfied when I was creating accounts in our dev system/etc. Which is annoying as hell, but I can't convince management, because our users _(older)_ tend to use some of the worst passwords out there.. so I can understand where it's coming from. Security & UX is hard. ------ staplers While I would love to use something like this, almost every site I can think of enforces worthless password rules like "Must include number, letter, special character" etc which effectively blocks these types of passwords. ~~~ brewdad Much like /u/hprotagonist above, I tend to use passwords like this for my pw manager, full disk encryption, PGP, etc. where I get to set the rules. Web sites or other uses outside my control get a randomly generated string of varying length. It doesn't have to be all or nothing and is probably better if it isn't. ------ mlaci Problem with generators and this scheme, they allow regeneration. Most people not using the first version, they generate a new until they like it enough to stop, which is not that random anymore as they think. ~~~ pkhamre So you're saying that generating a new password looses entropy? ~~~ setr _Choosing_ is the problem here -- it's now only as random as your preference Eg the scheme doesn't do its job well if you don't know the word, so the dictionary can be reduced by that much ~~~ ResidentSleeper On the other hand, I'd wager that the set of words that you can recognize is vastly larger than the set of words that you're likely to come up with on the spot. Hence, using a generator would still result in higher entropy then trying to come up with a password yourself. Random numbers picked by humans are notoriously biased. I'm guessing it's even worse when you ask them to come up with random words. ------ quantum5 Background: I liked the xkcd-style password generation scheme as it was easy to remember, but existing generators online (that I could find, at least) all use Math.random() or other cryptographically insecure random number generators. While an actual attack on the RNG seems far-fetched, the very idea doesn't sit well with my crypto nerd side. So I decided to create my own that uses a CSPRNG that I can trust. This was a while ago. Recently, I decided to package it up with a nice domain name and publish it in hopes that it would be useful to others. ~~~ perl4ever What about [https://www.random.org/](https://www.random.org/)? Why even use a PRNG if you can have the real thing? ~~~ quantum5 Because instead of just trusting your system, you'd also have to trust an external service to remain honest. CSPRNG is widely deemed acceptable for use as key material (unlike standard PRNGs), so there is no reason to add an external dependency. ~~~ atoponce Further, sufficiently seeded cryptographically secure RNGs are indistinguishable from true random white noise, so from a practical perspective, there is no point to require "true random". ------ beardedwizard So we are really getting passwords from remote hosted websites? Are people really about to copy, paste and use these right out of the browser? ~~~ daveoc64 What is the risk exactly? Even if the site knew for certain that you had used one of the passwords, they would have no idea where you used the password, and they wouldn't know your username or other credentials. They might not even have any way of accessing the system you're putting the password into. I'm sure a lot of people will use these sorts of sites to generate a whole bunch of passwords, and not even use any of them. ~~~ asdkhadsj I'd imagine the risk is pretty great, for the same reason I wouldn't paste a password here that I use. Sure, you may not know who I am, but if you were the site itself you get a ton of information on me.. which is more than I'd like you to know if you _also_ know one of my passwords. I agree, the risk is minimal. Nevertheless.. security, heh. ~~~ mlyle The site doesn't know the password, though-- it's generated clientside. ~~~ beardedwizard Will you be inspecting the code every single time it loads to ensure that has not changed? You are receiving this code from an untrusted 3rd party every time you visit. There is a big difference to trusting a known entity like lastpass, 1password, etc, all of whom are vulnerable to supply chain attacks. It is another thing entirely to trust a random website on hackernews. Payload decoders and password generators are some of the biggest honeypots out there. Combining this with an attack taking advantage of hidden form autofill, you could gain quite a bit of information to go along with that password. ~~~ mlyle If I were to use it, I'd probably just pull my own copy off github. If I were to recommend novices to use it-- I'd tell them to use a password manager locally, and something like that to generate a secure password to get into their own machine locally / get into their password manager-- which mitigates most of the risk if it turns rogue. ~~~ beardedwizard well then you wouldn't be using this or any other website, and this entire conversation would be moot :). ------ shaggyfrog Nice work! A passphrase, as opposed to a password, has spaces between each word. If you added those it would be easier to read, especially for mobile, if you used a multiline textarea, because the generated content isn’t fully readable at a glance. (Or don’t use a form input field at all — just put the passphrase in a div so the word breaks flow normally.) ~~~ james-skemp Yup. With the ability to add a separator (like a space, -, .) I'd switch over to this. Currently I use and recommend [https://preshing.com/20110811/xkcd-password- generator/](https://preshing.com/20110811/xkcd-password-generator/) ~~~ quantum5 Good idea, just added separators to the website. ~~~ pkhamre You could(/should) add space and make it the default separator :) ~~~ quantum5 Space support is included. You can save it as the default option if you want. ------ chaoticmass I have bookmarked this site for my own personal use. I also shared it with my co-workers in the IT dept. I think your site works well on selling itself if you assume the audience is coming from HN. From what I have observed, your site does not market itself well to a typical corporate IT dept who are not all programmers. I think if we want to promote wider adoption of this good password technique, we'll need a different approach. This is not a criticism-- You've done a job I admire. I think I might fork it and make another version that is approachable to a wider audience. Thank you! ------ lozf Reminds me of the perl module `hsxkpasswd`[0] which has more configure options, and also powers the online generator at [https://xkpasswd.net/s/](https://xkpasswd.net/s/) [0]: [https://github.com/bbusschots/hsxkpasswd](https://github.com/bbusschots/hsxkpasswd) ------ tzs For passwords I might have to enter by hand, such as WiFi passwords, I liked the pronounceable password option that 1Password used to have. The passwords were several single syllables string together by a separator. An example: neg- pen-nau-eng-fri-dot. There were options to change the separator, and to toss in digits and upper case if I remember correctly. Syllables were 2 to 4 letters long, I believe. At some point 1Password dropped that, replacing it something similar to "correct horse battery staple". It's words (3-10) separated by hyphen, space, period, comma, or underscore. E.g., "plasma.haggis.arrange.stultify". ~~~ pkulak Me too. I actually built my "ideal" password generator because nothing else was really cutting it for me. And an online generator is a no go. Because of security, of course, but I also just want to pipe my password straight into my clipboard, for example. [https://github.com/pkulak/pgen](https://github.com/pkulak/pgen) ------ chrisbai I rely on the built in password generator of Passfindr [https://passfindr.com](https://passfindr.com) using the same random number generator as mentioned in correcthorse.pw. When using a Password Manager, and one should, different passwords for every internet account is straight forward. ------ arbirk You forgot the translate to Finnish step ------ ThA0x2 You can achieve this with a one-liner: shuf -n 4 /usr/share/dict/words ~~~ 1e-9 This may not be cryptographically secure. Shuf can default to using a small amount of entropy.[1,2,3] To be certain, you can add the --random-source option: shuf --random-source=/dev/urandom -n 4 /usr/share/dict/words [1] [https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Rand...](https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Random- sources.html) [2] [https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/v8.5/gl/lib/rand...](https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/v8.5/gl/lib/randread.c) [3] [https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/v8.32/gl/lib/ran...](https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/v8.32/gl/lib/randread.c) Edit: As ThA0x2 points out in a reply, the latest version of shuf uses /dev/urandom to generate a default nonce, which vastly improves upon older versions. As long as your version of coreutils is at least 8.6 or later and your OS has /dev/urandom, the default should be fine. If you don't have /dev/urandom, even the latest version of shuf (version 8.32, as of June 15, 2020) will still default to an insecure nonce. ~~~ dllthomas I'm curious how practical an RNG attack actually is here (which absolutely isn't meant to serve as criticism of your surfacing the issue!). In any case, I expect it's much harder than a random "free password gen!" website saving results on the sly (... which is meant to be mild criticism of your framing, but not your recommendation :-p). ~~~ ThA0x2 shuf uses randint(), which defaults to /dev/urandom as the nonce source: [https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/v8.31/gl/lib/ran...](https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/v8.31/gl/lib/randread.c) It's going to be as practical to attack as anything that uses /dev/urandom. ~~~ dllthomas For sufficiently recent versions of shuf. It looks (... at a skim of the history, I could be confused) like older versions use pid, ppid, uid, gid, and time. In that case that's likely to be more practical than brute force if you've generated a password with notionally more than ~40 bits of entropy. That said, I suspect most people are indeed on a platform with a sufficiently recent version of shuf. (And a sufficiently old version may lack the random-source option.) ~~~ ThA0x2 RHEL 6 will be EOLd this November. That's the last supported version of RHEL that has this issue. Ubuntu 13.04, RHEL 7 and later don't suffer from this issue. I'd say almost everyone reading these comments is on a platform that does not suffer from this issue. ------ professorTuring lower, upper and numbers = 62 options \| wordlist = 10 000 options: 62^12 = 1e21 10 000^5 = 1e20 The problem is you not using a word generator and instead relying in your invention, most of the people will use top 5000 words (5000^5 = 1e18), imagine you can even lock one of the words (a color maybe?). So this way of thinking might be good if you know what you are doing and use uppers and lowers and symbols, if not, it is actually a bad advice. ------ throwaway8941 If I may egregiously misuse the famous quote, "those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." $ shuf --random-source=/dev/urandom -n6 /usr/share/dict/cracklib-small \| paste -sd- circulant-conjured-reigning-buzzed-awaiting-typifies ------ nlawalker See also [https://theworld.com/~reinhold/diceware.html](https://theworld.com/~reinhold/diceware.html) (the "original", as far as I know). KeePassXC has a passphrase generator, although it doesn't use the Diceware list as far as I know. [https://keepassxc.org/images/screenshots/linux/screen_006.pn...](https://keepassxc.org/images/screenshots/linux/screen_006.png) EDIT: Love the simplicity of [https://correcthorse.pw/](https://correcthorse.pw/), good work! ------ hprotagonist I tend to rely on [https://www.rempe.us/diceware/#eff](https://www.rempe.us/diceware/#eff) for my typeable password needs. 80% of my passwords are just line noise, because they live in a keepass database. 20% (workstation account logins, etc) are diceware. ~~~ bagacrap you type "glove blinks abruptly avatar salvaging marbled" every time you need to unlock your screen? ~~~ tomlagier Mine's a more meaningful sentence, but about the same length, yes. It doesn't take long to type a wholly-memorized sentence. ~~~ Jaruzel Based on the typically strict Corporate 5-minute auto-lock you find on work computers, that would get tiresome REALLY quickly :( ~~~ tomlagier Honestly, it's not any worse than a more typical number and symbol stew. You'd be surprised how quickly you can type a 40 character sentence, especially one that you've developed a bit of muscle memory for. I think it's likely as fast, if not faster than the more "typical" 12-16 character special-symbol fest. ------ NickBusey Shout out to the open source Bitwarden project which includes this out of the box. Check out bitwarden_rs for a good sefhosted option. ------ matmann2001 I know XKCD made a comic and everything, but isn't this type of password exactly why dictionary attacks exist? ~~~ loa_in_ In the original comic it is shown that entropy of these passwords is still higher than the method with random words and substitutions. That means more combinations even with full knowledge of used dictionary	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Crypto Voucher- Simple, secure and easy way of buying cryptocurrencies - AdelG https://cryptovoucher.io/ ====== AdelG To start trading or to invest your money, Crypto Voucher is the easiest and most convenient way to enter the crypto world. We offer a solution to buy Bitcoin, Litecoin or Ethereum instantly with Credit Cards, you can use it yourself or gift it to someone else as a Bitcoin Gift Card.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Game Closure SDK switches to the Mozilla Public License - mcav http://www.gameclosure.com/license.html ====== mcav Context: The Game Closure SDK, a toolkit for developing games in JavaScript that run on the web, iOS, and Android, used to be dual-licensed as the GPL and a proprietary license. The previous license used to require users to display a GC splash screen, among other things. The MPL removes these restrictions. Disclosure: I used to work at Game Closure.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Text Mate Fullscreen on Lion - gr3g http://gregosuri.com/2011/08/15/text-mate-full-screen.html ====== ajross What a bizarre packaging choice: bash/curl command to pull a shell script to pull and compile a github project which compiles and installs a Text Mate plugin. Yikes. ~~~ gr3g 1) This installs EGOTextMateFullScreen plugin (<https://github.com/enormego/EGOTextMateFullScreen>). I didn't write it and author didn't put a package out. 2) URL Shortening? I didn't have time to write the CSS to format my code on the page. The long links breaks the layout 3) How does it matter how its done as long as it works, especially when I spent more time responding to your comment than writing that script. ~~~ msbarnett > How does it matter how its done as long as it works Executing unknown scripts hiding behind obfuscated URLs is generally not considered a good idea. Given that this is a very non-standard and decidedly odd way of distributing a TextMate plug-in, a large degree of skepticism is warranted. ~~~ kennywinker I also was skeptical. A quick read of the contents of the shortened urls reveals nothing nefarious, however. ~~~ PCheese Did you read the contents in your standard web browser, like I did? What if it sent back a different set of commands if the user agent matched that of cURL? ~~~ quanticle Well, you're still free to curl the contents of the URL into a standard text file, and view it with the text editor of your choice (maybe even TextMate!). ------ sdfjkl Piping things from curl into bash is about the dumbest thing you can do security wise. Except if you also use an URL shortener, which means that in addition to trusting the author not to be evil, you're also trusting the shortener service to deliver what you (or the author) expected. ------ iamjustlooking I really wish lion didn't make your second monitor useless in full screen. ~~~ webfuel It's not completely useless, you can "click and drag windows and toolbars from the primary display to the secondary display" [http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/11/multiple-displays-full- screen...](http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/11/multiple-displays-full-screen-apps- mac-os-x-lion/) ~~~ chc As far as I can tell, that piece is really deceptive. You can drag floating windows from the same application that would normally float over the fullscreen app. You cannot, for example, fullscreen TextMate on your primary display and have Safari or Photoshop on the secondary. ------ acangiano $ git clone https://github.com/enormego/EGOTextMateFullScreen.git /tmp/EGOTextMateFullScreen $ xcodebuild -project /tmp/EGOTextMateFullScreen/EGOTextMateFullScreen.xcodeproj -target EGOTextMateFullScreen $ open /tmp/EGOTextMateFullScreen/build/Release/EGOTextMateFullScreen.tmplugin ------ MatthewPhillips Coding in full screen? For elite hackers who don't need to test the thing they're coding? ~~~ igorgue I run my tests from VIM. ~~~ rauljara You can also use multiple spaces. Fullscreen editor in one. Full screen terminal in another. Fullscreen browser in a third, to defeat the supposedly distractionless environment a fullscreen app does its best to offer you. ------ Xuzz My app Maximizer can do this dynamically for pretty much any app on your system (including TextMate, but also stuff like Firefox or Spotify). It's SIMBL based, but the code is clean and hopefully open source soon: <http://chpwn.com/apps/maximizer.html> ~~~ mauricemach I'm using maximizer with TextMate and Chrome. Works pretty well, thanks! The only caveat is that to see the drawer, you have to hide it and show it again. ~~~ angrycoder Chrome has real fullscreen and swipe gestures if you are using the dev build. ~~~ mauricemach Sorry, I'm actually using maximizer with Chromium 14 and the real full screen with Chrome dev. The only difference though is the "curtain" button, for which I don't have much use. ------ Aramgutang What assurance do I have that <http://j.mp/text-mate-full-screen> will not return "rm -rf ~/*"? ~~~ spicyj You don't have that assurance whenever you install anything. ------ redrory A screenshot would be nice. ~~~ sudont <http://cl.ly/2M1D3k2A1Q1b132w1p3J> <http://cl.ly/0r3O0h1T0c3T2T2M3c45> <http://cl.ly/453a0D1k0H3v34302P3Q> ------ patrickyan Chocolat (<http://chocolatapp.com>) seems like a promising replacement for TextMate, since TextMate 2 is vaporware. Lots of bugs right now though. ~~~ hox Sublime Text 2 (<http://www.sublimetext.com/2>) seems to be more advanced and isn't excluding users from its beta. ~~~ justinchen Distraction free mode on Sublime Text 2 is pretty awesome. ------ FuzzyDunlop this would be spot on if it handled the drawer nicely and the opening of folders. Mind it seems that Sublime Text 2 also poorly handles new files opened when the app is fullscreen. A proper implementation would once again make TextMate unbeatable on OS X. Glad it's there in some way or another though. Using fullscreen a lot more than I thought I ever would. ~~~ davej Works well with the missing drawer plugin: [https://github.com/downloads/jezdez/textmate- missingdrawer/M...](https://github.com/downloads/jezdez/textmate- missingdrawer/MissingDrawer-0.4.0.tmplugin.zip) ------ jasontan awesome, thank you. now if only we could do split panes... ~~~ _frog You might be interested in Chocolat[1], it's currently in alpha but I can get you an invite if you want [1]: <http://chocolatapp.com/> ~~~ tjstankus Well, if you're passing out invites... pretty please? I'm currently trying out different editors, not stuck on any particular one. ~~~ alextgordon You'd perhaps have more luck if you had an email address on your profile ;) Anyway, here's a few invite links for HN: [Edit: Sorry, all gone!] I should point out that it's a bit buggy, and still an alpha. So don't expect to be able to use it as your everyday editor just yet. ~~~ kennywinker Just redeemed #2 on the list, got 1 invite on signup: <http://chocolatapp.com/userspace/i/?e6cc78a7ef0db35> ~~~ dekz Stolen. Someone PM me email if they would like the next invite on the chain. ~~~ tortilla I'd appreciate an invite too. My gmail is my username. Thanks! ~~~ benbscholz If this is still going, I wouldn't mind an invite either. bbscholz@gmail.com ~~~ tortilla Sent. Thanks dekz. ~~~ rsenk330 Do you have any more invites? I've been hoping to get one for awhile now. ------ alexgodin Simple solution. Vim. ~~~ kriardol Vim has a command for putting Text Mate in fullscreen on OSX Lion? It really does have everything. ------ aristidesfl Who cares about Textmate nowadays anyway? ------ moonboots Full screen? stfu	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Built to Last: John McPhee's Way of Seeing - samclemens https://www.bookforum.com/inprint/025_04/20435 ====== EamonnMR McPhee is one of those are authors who can make science approachable and at the same time, the everyday people around it deeply fascinating. To HN readers I would recommend The Curve of Binding Energy or Annals of the Former World. ~~~ CPLX Annals of the Former World is incredible. The topic is so dry, it's about rocks, but his writing so so compelling it propels you forward into the story. I kept finding myself wondering why I was finding it interesting, since by all rights it shouldn't be, but somehow he draws you in. ~~~ EamonnMR It's about rocks but really it's about everything. ~~~ njarboe True. Everything on Earth is either a rock or not very old. To understand the history of Earth and evolution of life, one need to read the rocks. ------ acomjean I like his books. His writing style is good and a little dry. I sometime long for some diagrams and illustrations as trying to describe things in words sometimes can be difficult. For example : The descriptions of the lock and dams that keep the Mississippi being taken over by the Atchafalaya in text were good, but I found that a digram can be very illustrative. ~~~ byproxy I've only read "Assembling California", but I agree. I'll add, though, the dry-ness is offset with a bit of wit. A deadpan humor, almost. I enjoyed it and I'm sure I'll make my way through some more of his works. ~~~ cjarrett His 'Encounters with the Archdruid' was on the reading list on my Environmental Literature course. Funny enough, I had already read it a few years prior after grabbing it off of my father's bookshelf. If you are in any way interested in the sport of Tennis, I cannot recommend his 'Levels of the Game' more. It focuses on Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, but uses their history to paint a much bigger story.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How I Got a $20,000 USD Cheque from Microsoft - grumo http://grumomedia.com/how-i-got-a-20000-usd-cheque-from-microsoft/ ====== gigantor His video (<http://grumomedia.com/new-grumo-what-is-hipmunk/>) truly brought upon a smile in it's quest to convey simplicty. The spanish accent is very comforting in a way, like the time you visit a mexican resort and the person in the hotel's tour guide booth tells you very clearly and in very simple english what you can expect. None of this 'empower yourself' and 'be all you can be' by using our product bs, just tell me what the thing does. If your product is any good at solving my problem I won't need further convincing. ~~~ grumo Thanks, funny thing is that the only reason I used my own voice on the Hipmunk video is because I could not afford anyone else.. I even suggested Alexis Ohanian to change the voice. He replied: "Not in a million years!". One of the main reasons Grumo is where is today is thanks to Alexis, he is the living definition of "awesomeness" ;)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The 10,000-apartment tech campus: what if companies provided on-site housing? - mtviewdave http://itsacoop.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-10000-apartment-tech-campus-what-if.html ====== walshemj There are problems with having "tied" housing what happens when you leave or have a disagreement with your boss oops you are now homeless. Also a lot of these model villages like cadburys etc where very small c conservative and had rule about behavior out side of work that might not go down well. One real world example in my village in the UK even today both of the village pubs are not in the actual Parrish as the landowners didn't like the "workers" drinking - of course the landowners had wine with dinner but thats different sorry Mr Smith you haven't been mowing your lawn regularly enough so you are fired. ------ greenyoda Employers building housing for their employees isn't really a new idea: at some point in history, 3% of the U.S. population lived in "company towns".[1] But would you really want to live in a place where the only people you could socialize with are your co-workers, and where you'd be exiled from your entire community if you changed jobs or were fired? [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The AI Economist: Improving Equality and Productivity with AI-Driven Tax Policy - RichardRNN https://blog.einstein.ai/the-ai-economist/ ====== RichardRNN Paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.13332](https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.13332) Q&A: [https://www.salesforce.com/company/news- press/stories/2020/4...](https://www.salesforce.com/company/news- press/stories/2020/4/salesforce-ai-economist/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
core-js maintainer threatens millions of users due to new post-install ad policy - switz https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/635#issuecomment-526649749 ====== 0x0 With a threat like this, I think the best action going forward would be to kick the author off of npm, and re-purpose the npm package name to a frozen- in-time version of a clean ad-free fork of the latest release, perhaps with a deprecation warning ------ switz isaacs responded below and clarified that he doesn’t feel core-js is in violation of npm’s new policy [https://github.com/zloirock/core- js/issues/635#issuecomment-...](https://github.com/zloirock/core- js/issues/635#issuecomment-526792928) ICYM npm’s new policy: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20838078](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20838078)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Discussing Blackness on Reddit? Photograph Your Forearm First - fortran77 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/us/reddit-race-black-people-twitter.html ====== dvtrn I wonder if I could pass this test, being technically 'high-yella'. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_yellow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_yellow) ~~~ fortran77 I understand and respect their need for a private group but their method of verification certainly isn't fool-proof. ~~~ dvtrn I was honestly just surprised to find out /r/blackpeopletwitter still existed; maybe it's a Mandela moment for me but I could have sworn it was either banned or at least quarantined some time ago. At least for my part I went out of my way to make sure no posts from the sub ever appeared in my browser, so maybe that's what it was. I'm Afro-Cuban and to be honest the whole thing feels kind of minstrel-y to me. ~~~ lonelappde /r/coontown was banned. ~~~ dvtrn That’s the one I was thinking of. Thanks for the correction.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Elixir Is Erlang, not Ruby - stanislavb https://preslav.me/2020/09/06/elixir-is-not-ruby-elixir-is-erlang/ ====== latch While I agree, the article doesn't really give concrete examples. Elixir is layered, making it easy to learn and master. You can get pretty far with Phoenix without ever understanding (or even knowing about) the more fundamental building blocks or the runtime. In large part, this is because of its ruby-inspired syntax. You'll have to adjust to immutability, but that's pretty much it. Then one day you'll want to share state between requests and you'll realize that the immutability (which you're already comfortable with at this point) goes beyond just local variables: it's strictly enforced by these things called "processes". And you'll copy and paste a higher-level construct like an Agent or Genserver and add the 1 line of code to this root supervisor that was just a file auto-generated in your project. But that'll get you a) introduced to the actor model and b) thinking about messaging while c) not ever worrying about or messing up concurrency. Then you'll want to do something with TCP or UDP and you'll see these same patterns cohesively expressed between the runtime, the standard library and the language. Then you'll wan to do something distributed, and everything you've learnt about single-node development becomes applicable to distributed systems. Maybe the only part of Elixir which can get complicated are Macros / metaprogramming. But you can get far without ever understanding this, and Phoenix is so full of magic (which isn't a good thing), that by the time you do need it, you'll certainly have peaked behind the covers once or twice. The synergy between the runtime, standard library and language, backed by the actor model + immutability is a huge productivity win. It's significantly different (to a point where I think it's way more accurate to group Ruby with Go than with Elixir), but, as I've tried to explain, very approachable. ~~~ nickjj > copy and paste a higher-level construct like an Agent or Genserver and add > the 1 line of code to this root supervisor that was just a file auto- > generated in your project. But that'll get you a) introduced to the actor > model and b) thinking about messaging while c) not ever worrying about or > messing up concurrency. Isn't it well known that GenServers can become severe bottlenecks unless you know the inner workings of everything to the point where you're an expert? I'm not an Elixir expert or even used a GenServer in practice but I remember reading some warnings about using GenServers around performance because they can only handle 1 request at a time and it's super easy to bring down your whole system if you don't know what you're doing. This blog post explains how that happens: [https://www.cogini.com/blog/avoiding-genserver- bottlenecks/](https://www.cogini.com/blog/avoiding-genserver-bottlenecks/) And I remember seeing a lot of forum posts around the dangers of using GenServers (unless you know what you're doing). It's not really as easy as just copy / pasting something, adding 1 line and you're done. You need to put in serious time and effort to understand the intricacies of a very complex system (BEAM, OTP) if you plan to leave the world of only caring about local function execution. And as that blog post mentions, it recommends using ETS but Google says ETS isn't distributed. So now suddenly you're stuck only being able to work with 1 machine. This is a bit more limiting than using Python or Ruby and deciding to share your state in Redis. This really does typically require adding a few lines of code and now your state is saved in an external service and now you're free to scale to as many web servers you want until Redis becomes a bottleneck (which it likely never will). You can also freely restart your web servers without losing what's in Redis. I know you can do distributed state in Elixir too, but it doesn't seem as easy as it is in other languages. And it's especially more complicated / less pragmatic than other tech stacks because almost every other tech stack all use the same tools to share external state so it's a super documented and well thought out problem. ~~~ dragonwriter > And as that blog post mentions, it recommends using ETS but Google says ETS > isn't distributed. So now suddenly you're stuck only being able to work with > 1 machine. There is a mostly API-compatible distributed version of ETS in OTP, called DETS. And a higher-level distributed database built on top of ETS/DETS called Mnesia, again, in OTP. So, no, you aren't. > I know you can do distributed state in Elixir too, but it doesn't seem as > easy as it is in other languages. And it's especially more complicated / > less pragmatic than other tech stacks because almost every other tech stack > all use the same tools to share external state so it's a super documented > and well thought out problem. You can use the same external tools in Elixir as on platforms that don't have a full distributed database built in as it is in the OTP, so, I don't see how the fact that those external tools are widely used on other platforms makes Elixir _harder_. ~~~ b3orn > There is a mostly API-compatible distributed version of ETS in OTP, called > DETS. And a higher-level distributed database built on top of ETS/DETS > called Mnesia, again, in OTP. So, no, you aren't. DETS is the disk based term storage, it is as distributed as ETS. ------ pantulis The greatest achievement of Elixir is making the Erlang platform and ecosystem accessible to everyone. And that's because its "Ruby-ness". I learned Ruby with Rails, so in the same spirit you could learn Elixir with Phoenix and I really think it's a bona-fide approach to "graduate" to the BEAM world. But, caveat emptor, the BEAM world is like an alien wunder-weapon: everything we take for granted in the modern web development world was already invented --with flying colors too-- in Erlang/BEAM so there is a lot of overlapping in terms of architecture solutions. In a Kubernetes/Istio world, would you go for a full BEAM deployment? I don't say it's not an already solved problem but what's the perfect mix-ratio? It depends. ~~~ dynamite-ready The overlap between K8s and BEAM is a good question. Even amongst experienced BEAM (especially Erlang) programmers, there's a lot of conflicting information. From my limited understanding, Kubernetes is comparatively complicated, and can hamstring BEAM instances with port restrictions. On the other hand, there's a rarely documented soft limit on communication between BEAM nodes (informally, circa 70 units, IIRC). Above this limit, you have to make plans based on sub-clusters of nodes, though I have certainly not worked at that level of complexity. Would be interesting to hear what other people think about this specific subject. ~~~ toast0 I have no idea where this limit came from. I worked at WhatsApp[1], and while we did split nodes into separate clusters, I think our big cluster had around 2000 nodes when I was working on it. Everything was pretty ok, except for pg2, which needed a few tweaks (the new pg module in Erlang 23 I believe comes from work at WhatsApp). The big issue with pg2 on large clusters, is locking of the groups when lots of processes are trying to join simultaneously. global:set_lock is very slow when there's a lot of contention because when multiple nodes send out lock requests simultaneously and some nodes receive a request from A before B and some receive B before A, both A and B will release and retry later, you only get progress when there's a full lock; applying the Boss node algorithm from global:set_lock_known makes progress much faster (assuming the dist mesh is or becomes stable). The new pg I believe doesn't take these locks anymore. The other problem with pg2 is a broadcast on node/process death that's for backwards compatibility with something like Erlang R13 [2]. These messages are ignored when received, but in a large cluster that experiences a large network event, the amount of sends can be enormous, which causes its own problems. Other than those issues, a large number of nodes was never a problem. I would recommend building with fewer, larger nodes over a large number of smaller nodes though; BEAM scales pretty well with lots of cores and lots of ram, so it's nicer to run 10 twenty core nodes instead of 100 dual core nodes. [1] I no longer work for WhatsApp or Facebook. My opinions are my own, and don't represent either company. Etc. [2] [https://github.com/erlang/otp/blob/5f1ef352f971b2efad3ceb403...](https://github.com/erlang/otp/blob/5f1ef352f971b2efad3ceb4030e2367e8996f893/lib/kernel/src/pg2.erl#L286) ~~~ ksec >I think our big cluster had around 2000 nodes when I was working on it. Is there fairly recent? I thought WhatsApp was on FreeBSD with Powerful Node instead of Lots of Little Node? >BEAM scales pretty well with lots of cores and lots of ram, so it's nicer to run 10 twenty core nodes instead of 100 dual core nodes. Something the I was thinking of when reading POWER10 [1], what system and languages to use with a maximum of 15 Core x 16 Socket x SMT 8 in a single machine. That is 1920 Threads! [1] [https://www.anandtech.com/show/15985/hot-chips-2020-live- blo...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/15985/hot-chips-2020-live-blog-ibms- power10-processor-on-samsung-7nm-1000am-pt) ~~~ toast0 Lots of powerful nodes. That cluster was all dual xeon 2690v4. My in-depth knowledge of the clusters ends when they moved from FreeBSD at SoftLayer to Linux at Facebook. I didn't care for the environment and it made a nice boundary for me --- once I ran out of FreeBSD systems, I was free to go, and I didn't have to train people to do my job. We did some trials of quad socket x86, but didn't see good results. I didn't run the tests, but my guess from future reading is we were probably running into NUMA issues, but didn't know how to measure or address them. I have also seen that often two dual socket machines are way less expensive than a quad socket with the same total number of cores and equivalent speeds; with Epyc's core counts, single socket looks pretty good too. Keeping node count down is good, but it's a balance between operation costs and capital costs, and lead time for replacements. The BEAM ecosystem is fairly small too, so you might be the only one running a 16 socket POWER 10 beast, and you'll need to debug it. It might be a lot simpler to run 16 single socket nodes. Distribution scales well for most problems too. ------ phreack I find this quite funny because it's my first time hearing I was supposed to be thinking of Elixir as a Ruby thing. I actually learnt about it from a concurrent computing class and it was always an Erlang thing, and now I know it as the magic sauce behind Discord that I always want to try and never find a good reason to. ~~~ linux2647 > I always want to try and never find a good reason to As someone who learns best by doing, what are some practical projects that someone could do to learn Elixir? I know that Elixir is quite capable of solving certain kinds of problems very elegantly, but maybe my experience hasn’t presented these kinds of problems yet. Outside of building a Discord- like server or a Phoenix web app, what other good practical projects/applications are there for Elixir? ~~~ dnautics I'm probably the crazy one in the community who is using Elixir for the most super-strange things. For example: \- as a custom DHCP server to do multiple concurrent PXE booting (among other things) \- as a system for provisioning on-metal deployments (like ansible but less inscrutable). \- as a system for provisioning virtual machines over distributed datacenters. I'll probably also wind up doing DNS and HTTP+websocket layer-7 load balancing too by the end of the year. Probably large-size (~> 1TB) broadband file transfer and maybe even object storage gateway by next year. I've rolled most of these things out to prod in just about year. I honestly can't imagine doing all of these things in Go, without a team of like 20. Elixir sucks at: \- platform-dependent, like IOS, android, or like SDL games or something, \- number-crunchy, like a shoot em up, or HPC. \- something which requires mutable bitmaps (someone this past weekend brought up "minecraft server"). Actually even desktop might be okay, especially if you pair it up with electron. ~~~ grantjpowell > Elixir sucks at: > number-crunchy, like a shoot em up, or HPC. > something which requires mutable bitmaps (someone this past weekend brought > up "minecraft server") One thing I'd like to see for the BEAM communities long term are well maintained libraries of NIFs[0] for high performance and possibly mutable data structures. Projects like rusterl[1] and the advances made on dirty schedulers make this more feasible than it used to be. It would be cool to write all the high level components of a minecraft-esque game in Elixir, and drop down to rust when you need raw performance. Similar to the relationship between lua/c++ in some modern game engines [0] [http://erlang.org/doc/man/erl_nif.html](http://erlang.org/doc/man/erl_nif.html) [1] [https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler](https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler) ~~~ dnautics I'm in agreement; though I don't like rust (can't read it) and am the author of [https://hexdocs.pm/zigler/Zigler.html](https://hexdocs.pm/zigler/Zigler.html) ------ jakuboboza The best things about Elixir are mix and phoenix. We all can talk about how well under load on multicore machines it behaves but that is the same as we would talk about Erlang. What pushes Elixir beyond Erlang is advanced macro language that allows for things like Ecto, mix with moden Ruby like gem+rake kinda dependency management and really really good solid testing framework. Elixir/Phoenix is really good. And the ecosystem is also pretty solid. Pros: * Functional language __* Multicore support built in * Mix * Phoenix * REPL * solid ecosystem of most needed tools Cons are: * Functional language __* Still niche adoption, not many talented people to pick from. * If you are deploying via release ( as you should ) mix is going away in production __Can be plus or minus depending on people reading it etc. Now things like LiveView are just cherry on top. In general Elixir/Phoenix is a full package. ~~~ lawn I haven't done a release with Elixir or Phoenix yet and the documentation about it is quite confusing. There are many different ways but I have no idea which one to choose. Why should I deploy with release? ~~~ nickjj Yeah it's super confusing, especially since mix releases are now a thing, but weren't before. I've heard Chris McCord (the author of Phoenix) say he doesn't use Elixir releases in production in most of his consulting company's client work. He talked about it in some podcast like 6 months ago. I think they just run the same mix command as you would in development but he wasn't 100% clear on that. But yeah, it's not easy to reason about it, and also if you decide to use releases it's a bummer you lose all of your mix tasks. You can't migrate your database unless you implement a completely different strategy to handle migrations. But then if you ever wanted to do anything else besides migrations that were mix tasks, you'd have to port those over too. ~~~ dnautics > it's a bummer you lose all of your mix tasks That's not true at all. Mix Tasks are just code. Assuming you stashed them in /lib (or someplace that elixirc reaches) you can call them in a release using eval. path/to/bin eval "Mix.Task.MyMixTask.run(...)" ~~~ nickjj Ah nice to know. I've seen a bunch answers around having to jump through larger hoops to get to run mix tasks in releases. Are all config options still available to be read in mix tasks that are called that way? What about Mix functions like Mix.env()? If you Google around the topic of database migrations in Elixir releases you'll find like 5 different ways to do them with no clear "this is the best answer". ~~~ Ndymium Mix doesn't exist in releases. You can get config options like normal, but not `Mix.env/0`. You can compile your current env into a config option though, and use that at runtime. Here's an example how to set up an Ecto migrator task with Mix releases: [https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/releases.html#ecto-migrations- and...](https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/releases.html#ecto-migrations-and-custom- commands) ------ m12k As someone with a background in Objective-C, Swift, C++, C# and Java, and currently using Ruby, I'm looking for my next language for web development. Elixir sounds like a step up from Ruby, but I really miss static typing, and I find it hard to justify investing time in yet another language that doesn't have it. But what are the alternatives? I'm looking for something with static typing, good editor support, mature community projects (e.g. testing on par with rspec), faster than Ruby (though most statically typed languages tend to be) and if it supports some functional paradigms that could be a plus (I dabbled in F# and SML previously). \- Scala is an option, but build times sound like an issue, and the JVM is a bit 'heavy' (e.g. startup times, min memory usage). \- Haskell sounds cool, but maybe a bit too esoteric? (i.e. is it worth the trouble, does it have all the middleware I'm used to) \- C# could be an option, but is the open source/community support there? (if you're not a corporate shop, doing corporate things). \- And then there's Rust, which I'm fascinated by, but I'm also worried that I'll be less productive worrying about lifetimes all the time, and that it's less mature (though growing fast, and seems to have attracted an amazing community of very talented people). I'm also interested in ways to use a language like that in the frontend - Scalajs sounds pretty mature, C# has Blazor and Rust seems like one of the best ways to target WebAssembly. So what is a boy to do? Stick to Ruby until the Rust web story is more mature? Try out Elixir in the meantime? Join the dark side and see what C# web dev is like these days? It can be really hard evaluating ecosystems like that from the outside. ~~~ smabie Ocaml/ReasonML checks all the boxes you listed. The tool chain is extremely mature and it's pretty easy to pick up. ~~~ devmunchies This. Although I would not use Reason since the compiler layer, bucklescript, changed its name to Rescript to rebrand as its own frontend language and left Reason holding the bag. There is no reference to OCaml in any documentation that was once under the bucklescript project. It even created its own sytax that is different than Reason and Ocaml to something more like JavaScript. It basically should have been a new project and have had nothing to do with bucklescript. The worst part is that the owner of bucklescript even owned some properties that had the name "reasonml" in it (like reasonml.org and the reasonml discord group, which weren't owned by the Reason team) and then he pointed all those thing to Rescript. Just the confusion did some serious damage to Reason. My advice is to stick to OCaml. ~~~ smabie Yeah I don't actually like ReasonML and don't think it should exist. OCaml's syntax is great and easy to use. Ocaml is a seriously underrated language and would be my goto choice for developing a native or webapp. I would still use Scala for backend development, though. The JVM is kind of a drag, though. ------ atonse The biggest adjustment for me was the fact that everything is immutable. Apart from that, everything has been simpler to reason about in elixir. Now objects feel very weird. ~~~ feifan Elixir seems to encourage simple data structures — everything is made up of basic data structures, and since there's no encapsulation, libraries seem to be built with an attitude of "developers are gonna inspect everything so we might as well make things clear and simple". I only noticed this in contrast to libraries in popular OO languages (most recently Python) where everything is done through objects that often have inscrutable instance variables and "missing" methods/methods that library authors simply haven't gotten around to implementing. Having a small library of functions operating on a small number of data structures makes programming a lot more intuitive than a large number of classes, each with their bespoke set of things you can do to them. ~~~ jake_morrison Instead of "lack of encapsulation", it's more "lack of private state". In an object oriented language, you have private instance variables and methods to manipulate them. In a functional language, you have functions which manipulate data structures. If possible, the data structure would have straightforward fields which are public and documented. If necessary, you might make it opaque, expecting only the library which manages the data structure to manipulate it. One way to think about this is that in functional programming, the "verbs" (functions and manipulation patterns like map) are more generic and the "nouns" (data structures) are less important than in OO languages. See [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in- kingdom...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of- nouns.html) ~~~ leghifla There is no encapsulation like in OOP (data level), but there is another kind of encapsulation (process level): a process is the only one accessing/modifying its own state. And this is very liberating when you need to think about what is going on, what could go wrong... ------ josefrichter I guess the point of this all is that there's BEAM underneath all this. And it turns out to be one of the best solutions out there for web apps. Erlang has some bad rep for "weird syntax", but it's completely unfounded, the syntax is actually quite simple and clean. Elixir opens doors mainly for Rubyists, but there are some other paths to discover BEAM. Check out: Luerl – Lua on Erlang [https://github.com/rvirding/luerl](https://github.com/rvirding/luerl) LFE - Lisp Flavoured Erlang [https://github.com/rvirding/lfe](https://github.com/rvirding/lfe) ~~~ dragonwriter > Erlang has some bad rep for "weird syntax", but it's completely unfounded, > the syntax is actually quite simple and clean. Anything that isn't Algol-flavored and either procedural or class-based OOP tends to be seen as weird syntax, and much more so if it ticks both boxes. It's not as much a matter of simple and clean as familiar in a world where almost everything people will be exposed to first tends to come from a narrow design space. ------ sickcodebruh Every time I think about using Phoenix, I get scared off by warnings about how not knowing BEAM can result in serious problems. I’m not sure if that conclusion is justified but it’s where I end up every time. It’s odd and unfortunate that Elixir and especially Phoenix seem to have invested heavily in being approachable but the rest of the ecosystem seems to have warning signs posted all over the place. Is this a fair impression? Or is it possible to run Phoenix in production and gradually learn more about the BEAM, leveling up as you encounter new challenges? ~~~ josevalim We work hard exactly so that you can run Phoenix in production and gradually learn more about the BEAM along the way! One recent example is the built-in dashboard showing all the different data the VM and the framework provide: [https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_dashboard/](https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_dashboard/) \- at first it may be daunting but providing a web-based experience to help familiarize with the building blocks is hopefully a good first step. We also added tooltips along the way to provide information about new concepts. The same applies to Elixir: learning all of functional programming, concurrent programming, and distributed programming would definitely be too much to do at once, so we do our best to present these ideas step by step. For what is worth, this is also true for Erlang. It has tools like Observer (which was used as inspiration for the dashboard) and a great deal of learning materials. One last advice is to not drink the cool-aid too much. For example, you will hear people talking about not using databases, about distributed cluster state, etc, and while all of this is feasible, resist the temptation of playing with those things until later, unless the domain you want to use requires explicitly tackling those problems. I hope this helps and have fun! ------ spapas82 Elixir is like an abstraction on top of Erlang and its runtime(otp). It heavily depends on the data structures of Erlang and its very difficult to extend it beyond Erlang's limitations / capabilities. When you take macros out of the way, Elixir programs can be translated line by line to Erlang. That OTP dependancy is considered the great strength of Elixir by many but it also has disadvantages. The thing with Erlang is that it ain't a general purpose programming language like Java or Python but a niche telecom software language. Erlang is marketised like that and from what I've heard it's really great at that (telecom software). But nobody proposes to write f.e a game or a Gui app in Erlang. Elixir on the other hand is marketised as a general purpose programming language. People that start a journey of learning Elixir must be very careful and understand that there are a lot of applications that Elixir can't be used for because of Erlang's limitations. Also, when you start using it you'll see that common applications outside of the Erlang telecom niche, like the polular phoenix web framework and its ecto orm like library make very heavy use of macros and message passing abstractions that seem strange in a lot of situations. Of course all will fall in place after you understand the Erlang dependecy. ~~~ dnautics I can assure you erlang is not a 'niche telecom language's, as I have used it, in prod, in so many ways that have nothing to do with telecoms. One mini- project I'm planning on working on for fun is to use it for HDL simulations, because its message passing concurrency is a nice way of cleanly dealing with eventing voltage edge transition logic. > But nobody proposes to write f.e a game or a Gui app in Erlang. Yet square enix uses elixir for _game orchestration_ ------ vinceguidry I came to the same conclusion as the author, though not quite in the same way. Everything I needed to know about what Ruby was was given to me when I attempted to learn and love Crystal. Similar syntax does not make a similar language. Smalltalk is far closer to Ruby than Crystal ever could be. What makes Ruby so lovable is, in a few words, the _pure_ object orientation. This is the source of all it's flexibility. Any concept can be created and tersely described. It's almost as semantically flexible as Lisp and ultimately friendlier. You'll never get these benefits in a language that looks like Ruby. It's not the syntax at all, it's the semantics, and you can't get Ruby semantics without actually being Ruby. ~~~ grantjpowell > [ruby] is almost as semantically flexible as Lisp and ultimately friendlier Elixir for the most part _is_ a Lisp, and inherits almost all of Lisp's semantic flexibility also I write Elixir full time now after writing Ruby for several years. At first I struggled getting out of the ruby meta programming mindset. After reading some advanced lisp books, the concepts of quote/unquote began to click and now I feel like my ability to meta-program in Elixir is much stronger than in Ruby. ~~~ vinceguidry Not to take away from the sheer amaze-balls power that lisp offers, you can get Ruby superpowers just from one book, Metaprogramming Ruby 2, which is sadly out of print. Here's a 2005 article comparing Ruby favorably to Lisp: [http://www.randomhacks.net/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an- accepta...](http://www.randomhacks.net/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-acceptable- lisp/) I learned Lisp, went through the whole of HtDP, tried to get into it, but Ruby's friendliness is really special and unique. ~~~ fouc [1,2,3].map {\|n\| nn }.reject {\|n\| n%3==1 } [1,2,3] \|> Enum.map(&(&1&1)) \|> Enum.reject(&(rem(&1,3)==1)) Still somewhat familiar heh ------ lawik Coming into Elixir from mostly doing Python but having it strongly recommended by a Rubyist I was a bit surprised to find myself in the middle of an implicit ex-Ruby world. It has been fine. But in contrast to the article, Elixir has always been about Erlang/OTP for me. I've never cared much about Ruby/Rails because it felt equivalent to the Python/Django which I already know. ~~~ dnautics I would say that in my experience everything outside of Phoenix is more explicit than python. There's a lot of hidden implicitness in python that drives me up the wall when I'm trying to chase a bug in someone else's code; I rarely have that problem in Elixir (even with phoenix, usually chasing where the code comes from is not terribly hard). ~~~ lawik Haha, I was referring to feeling the implicitness of "everyone came from Ruby" which I didn't, rather than anything in the language. Sorry if I was unclear :) ------ htnsao Funny I came across this same article earlier today while looking into a Flow- Based Programming framework for Elixir called Flowex. [1] [1] [https://github.com/antonmi/flowex](https://github.com/antonmi/flowex) ------ didibus Elixir is a little bit of Erlang, a little bit of Clojure, a little bit of Ruby, and a little bit of its own thing. Together that makes it that Elixir is Elixir. ~~~ Kototama It's a lot of Erlang :-) ------ mcv I hadn't heard of Elixir yet. I did use Ruby ages ago, loved the syntax, but the language felt a bit flakey at times (for example, I had a project where I needed to use unicode that didn't turn out to be properly supported). Erlang has been on my radar ever since a friend wrote either Tetris or Conway's Game of Life in 3 lines of Erlang. Never got around to learning it, though. If Elixir is a friendlier gateway to Erlang, it might be exactly right for me. ~~~ Gravityloss Odd, I've seen so many encoding problems in other languages (Python etc) but unicode has worked completely flawlessly in Ruby always. ~~~ mcv Are you sure? I'm reasonably sure that Ruby 1.8 or earlier didn't have flawless unicode support yet. ~~~ Gravityloss Only used 1.8.7 or later versions. That seems to have been released in 2008. [https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/releases/](https://www.ruby- lang.org/en/downloads/releases/) ------ jrochkind1 At the time, making a language that on ran on the Erlang VM with Erlang semantics that _looked_ like ruby probably seemed like a huge advantage to Elixir. (Plus, the people who developed it were rubyists and former rubyists who honestly liked the 'look alike' elements they took from ruby, it wasn't just a cynical attempt at manipulation). but these days ruby's popularity seems to be waning (personally I don't think for any _technical_ reasons, especially when compared to it's nearest neighbor python; to me it's like a 'betamax vs vhs' thing, and makes me sad, but nonetheless) -- and the association to ruby may actually be holding it back as people have (IMO unjustified) negative perceptions of ruby. :( ------ perlpimp I love how documentation and tests are intertwined - bonus on thinking this way from get go. ------ samuell Now that we have Elixir (Erlang looking like Ruby) and Crystal (Go concurrency dressed up like Ruby[1]), I'd be primarily be interested to see how these two languages stack up against each other, what niches they might address etc. [1] Did a small comparison here: [https://rillabs.com/posts/crystal- concurrency-easier-syntax-...](https://rillabs.com/posts/crystal-concurrency- easier-syntax-than-golang) ~~~ dnautics neither Go nor Crystal have the same sort of failure-domain support that Erlang Vm provides. ~~~ samuell Indeed, but at the same time, it seems people are using both Go and Erlang/Elixir for a lot of similar use cases (scaleable web-apps), which makes me interested in what specific use cases they do respectively shine. ------ lovebes I don't know Rails. I know Python and Golang. Worked in a data-intensive, data heavy startup, throwing microservices, nanoservices in a haphazard fashion with K8S backing the "throw and see something sticks" approach. Elixir, and Phoenix makes me think. About three years ago, when we started the company, if we had these two tech... we could've been saved so much dev time focusing on the core tech, instead of making scaffolding work. ~~~ erinan Same here. Microservices have their place if you expect to have to scale like craaaaazzzzy or if you know that your platform will be huge with many different parts but you can go a LONG way with a Phoenix monolith while being "happier" and more productive. From my (limited) experience it's an ideal framework for startups or new web apps. I've also heard excellent things about replacing painful microservice setups with one Phoenix app. There is just so much you can do with it at scale and also so much you don't have to do (e.g. channels + integrated pub/sub are a godsend). Definitely my new favorite framework (+ language) for web dev. ------ microcolonel After using Elixir professionally for a while, I still barely knew that it was supposed to have anything to do with Ruby aside from the oversized punctuation. ------ etxm I really enjoy writing elixir and I’ve had some really quick wins that have scaled effortlessly on the projects I’ve deployed using it. I would love to use it to build a desktop app. I’ve fooled around with Scenic for building a UI, but haven’t figured out a way to distributed a binary besides a self extracting executable. ------ namelosw Elixir is basically an Erlang that looks like Ruby instead Prolog. Combined with Phoenix which looks like Rails, this language is really getting traction. I wonder if an Erlang that looks like JavaScript would work. It would be like what ReasonML to OCaml but may works better on the server side. ------ deltron3030 I'm a few weeks into Elixir and it and the ecosystem definitely feel more techy and mathy than Ruby. It's more comparable to JS and node, it's like a more consistent JS without the OO stuff plus convention over configuration. ------ b0rsuk I'm getting the impression that Elixir is Erlang in Ruby's clothing, a bit like Rust is (functional language) in C's clothing. Does that sound fair? ------ bigbassroller Out of the ashes of Ruby, the Elixir cures and the Phoenix rises. My keyboard is ready! ~~~ joelbluminator Ashes of Ruby? Look at a jobs board, let me know how many Pheonix jobs you see there compared to Rails. ~~~ pampa And 99% of thse jobs are legacy RoR codebases, big hairy balls of mud. Good for job security and pays well (somebody has to support it all), but somewhat boring. Also the ruby ecosystem is in decay. A lot of libraries are abandoned or on life-support - just do a random search on rubygems and check release dates. ~~~ joelbluminator "legacy RoR" , so if it's not a 2 year old startup "changing the world" \- it's boring? Working in Stripe / Shopify / Github is boring? I'm pretty sure btw new projects are being started in Ruby in bigger numbers than Elixir (which isn't saying much, but still). I don't really love those language wars but I don't see why Elixir has to keep trying to assert itself by dissing Ruby. First - at least by numbers, it's way way smaller. Second - it should be more confident in itself. ~~~ pampa I'm not bashing ruby or something. I love ruby, I have been using ruby/rails since rails 0.9. Still using ruby with roda/sequel, and i think it is the best language to rapidly prototype and explore ideas. But the reality is, that all the interesting and cool stuff is happening somewhere else now. Ruby is still a great language, but the active community outside rails is shrinking and the creativity isnt there anymore. People prefer to explore novel ideas in different languages now - rust, go, elixir etc, even if they do ruby for a living. And rails is showing its age too. Every rails project i encountered was a petrified spagetti monolyth that had to be broken up and refactored into smaller pieces. ~~~ joelbluminator No argument with you there, Ruby / Rails is pretty boring by now. As someone who's looking for a stable stack I'm absolutely fine with that. ~~~ RandoHolmes No framework that acts like Rails should be considered a stable stack. If the answer to the question of "will it be supported in 5 years" is no, it can never be considered a "stable stack". ~~~ joelbluminator Can you clarify? I don't see what's so unstable about Rails. Probably webpacker was the biggest change in Rails 6 and that's not mandatory. ~~~ RandoHolmes If I write an application in asp.net core it will continue functioning on the most recent version of .net core and asp.net core 5 years from now. If I do the same thing on RoR it will not, guaranteed. I've lost count of the number of times I've gotten a new client and had them on a web framework that was EOL, on a version of the language that was EOL, and on an OS that was EOL (because they couldn't get the EOL language/framework running on a modern OS). Anytime you use something like RoR you're automatically taking on a higher maintenance burden because you MUST upgrade or you'll find yourself in a spot where you're trying to decide if you want to rewrite or pull it up to the newest version. No part of that description screams stability. ~~~ joelbluminator OK, stability is relative. Compared to Node / Elixir Rails is still pretty stable. I'd put it with stacks like Laravel / Django. ASP.net probably changes less, I agree. But .net core was a huge change though, kind of a new framework right? new runtime even. ~~~ AlchemistCamp I have an Elixir app from four years ago that still runs with no issues, even on the current version. Can you elaborate? There's no plan to ever have a v2.0. ~~~ joelbluminator I don't have any experience with Elixir / Pheonix. From comments I read, even things like deployment change frequently in Elixir, and major libraries are created or abandoned. It's just still a very new ecosystem. In 5-10 years I'm sure the rate of change will decline. Then there is a stack like Node where constant change seems to be just part of the culture. Rails changes too, but not as much. ~~~ RandoHolmes Elixir compiles and runs on BEAM, which is a technology that's roughly 34 years old. I think most elixir projects are on Phoenix, and while I can't speak too much about the speed of that project, the poster you're responding too has clearly stated they have an app that's 4 years old and running just fine so I have to believe it's not as much of an issue as you think. ~~~ joelbluminator Based on the one comment from the one guy - talking about one app that might be not even Phoenix - it's definitely not an issue. ~~~ AlchemistCamp It was a Phoenix app. Upgrading from v1.2 to 1.5 is very straightforward, the largest part being replacing Brunch with Webpack for the front-end. There are some new choices for building releases that make it easier for people who prefer to use run time environment mentioned variables for configuration instead of compile time ones. Previous ways of building releases still work as before. I make releases with Distillery just as I did back in 2016. The main change in my release workflow is that now I use Gitlab CI/CD, and that's unrelated to any Elixir or Phoenix changes. ------ philosopher1234 Over herr ------ gosukiwi Last time I tried Elixir it had some rough edges where you had to use some other ugly-ass language (I think it was Erlang?) to do some things. I immediately stopped learning after that. It feels like before learning Elixir, you need to learn Erlang, and I was just too lazy. Kind of using Clojure. You don't NEED to, but knowing Java helps. A lot. You need to learn the ecosystem, standard library, etc. You don't just pull a banana, you pull the gorilla holding the banana. ~~~ baby yup, I recommend just learning erlang. ~~~ dnautics maybe it's just me. I can read and write erlang, but I still think it's harder to read. It's got a lot of baggage behind it (like <<"this monstrosity for binaries">>); map syntax is atrocious, and lexical substitution should probably be considered to be an mistake this day in age. ~~~ baby I've reviewed erlang apps and I found them surprisingly easy to read, like really really clear. Perhaps it was the developers who did a good job, but I suspect it is the language. Sure some of the syntax is not super pretty, but I'd bet you would get used to it if you programmed in erlang more frequently. ~~~ dnautics I can't believe it's a good job: most of what I read in erlang is the OTP source. There are some real stinkers in there, in modules that barely anyone uses anymore (so there aren't any bug reports), like tftp (but when you need it you need it). And if you've ever tried chasing the ssl code, there's definitely some java-esque factory patterns hiding in there where one module or another drops an interface back to its caller, and the call stack weaves several times between two or three modules even.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Most applicable functional language to learn? - alttab I've been reading through a Haskell introduction for C programmers, here: http://www.haskell.org/~pairwise/intro/section1.html.<p>Before reading through this, I understood the concept. I understood expressiveness, no declarations, functions are data and data are functions, etc. I understand the concept and how side-effect free code creates wins, and even could see how this concept could be used for web programming.<p>But I'm not certain if I should keep plugging away with this tutorial, or if theres something better out there with Lisp or Scheme, and where my time is best spent.<p>Any tutorials that take a relaxed presentation style and try not to keep it completely mathematical (my CS set theory books bored the crap out of me and sometimes got very confusing), would be best.<p>Functional programming is something missing from my skill set and its beginning to bother me that I'm not slightly proficient in at least one good one.<p>Thanks guys! ====== hga Scheme is great since it's so breathtakingly simple, but the static functional languages like Haskell have pushed FP far beyond basic Scheme (then again, you can roll your own whatever with Scheme, although if you like static typing that would be a pain (to add)). You should look at Clojure (<http://clojure.org/>), which pushes the FP aspect of Lisp _hard_ , especially so that you can do interesting concurrency things. It's "secret sauce" is a data structure (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_array_mapped_trie>) that pretty neatly solves the trivial update problem (changes are O(n) where n is no greater than 32 and more likely 5-6). Upon this foundation of practical immutable data several methods for dealing with concurrency are provided, e.g. actor like "agents" (not actors since they share the same address space, but that's safe) and an MVCC STM. And of course it's a Lisp, which might be nice if you're tired of static typing and/or complex syntax (albeit more complex than earlier Lisps since vectors, hashes and sets are first class citizens and quite a bit of normal syntax uses vectors). The Clojure community is also nice, friendly and helpful, and doing interesting things like monads which have been adopted into the official contributed library. ------ jacquesm I'm planning to invest some serious time in Clojure this year because I think it is currently the 'best of breed' functional language when it comes to writing web applications (which is why I'm interested in it). ~~~ alttab Ah, totally forgot about clojure. My functional prowess is so low its sad. Does anyone have good links? I'm looking for a good mix of theoretical and practical application. ~~~ hga Here's a very quick dump of some things waiting to be read/digested/whatever in my Firefox tabs and other notes: Learning Clojure: The best concise intro I've come across: <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Learning_Clojure> You can't go wrong starting with the introductory stuff on the site: <http://clojure.org/rationale> This looks like a good longer intro, but I haven't more than glanced at it: <http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html> A longer Wikibook: <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming> Monad tutorial (site currently broken): [http://onclojure.com/2009/03/05/a-monad-tutorial-for- clojure...](http://onclojure.com/2009/03/05/a-monad-tutorial-for-clojure- programmers-part-1/) And there's one Clojure v 1.0 book out, only $20 for the ebook version: <http://www.pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure> (Note that a whole lot of learning material assumes you're coming from a Java background ... which I'm not (in fact, I learned MACLISP before C and never had a chance to go beyond C++ to C# or Java).) Setting up your EMACS Clojure development environment (VIM and various IDEs are also supported): <http://incanter-blog.org/2009/12/20/getting-started/> and <http://lisp-book.org/contents/ch18.html> And there are a _bunch_ of videos, Rich Hickey does them well; note that most of the quotes below are from someone else that I then cut and pasted into my TODO file for future reference: Clojure for Lisp Programmers Part 1 of 2: <http://blip.tv/file/1313398> Part 1 of a presentation by Rich Hickey at the Boston Lisp meeting. A fairly extensive introduction to Clojure, with a presumption of prior knowledge of Lisp. Transcript available at: [http://clojure.googlegroups.com/web/clojure- for-lispers-tran...](http://clojure.googlegroups.com/web/clojure-for-lispers- transcript.txt) Clojure for Java Programmers - 1 of 2: <http://blip.tv/file/982823> Part 1 of a presentation by Rich Hickey to the NYC Java Study Group. A gentle introduction to Clojure, part 1 focuses on reader syntax, core data structures, code-as-data, evaluation, special operators, functions, macros and sequences. No prior exposure to Lisp is presumed. Persistent Data Structures and Managed References: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity-State- Rich...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity-State-Rich-Hickey) ( _very_ good). Clojure Concurrency: <http://blip.tv/file/812787> A presentation by Rich Hickey to the Western Mass. Developers Group on Clojure and concurrency. Brief overview of Clojure, discussion of concurrency issues, locking, and immutabiity. In-depth look at Clojure's refs, transactions and agents. Demonstration and review of code for a multithreaded ant colony simulation. Clojure Sequences: <http://blip.tv/file/734409> An informal introductory talk/screencast covering Clojure's sequences by Rich Hickey, the author of Clojure. Covers the motivation behind sequences, their relationship to cons, iterators/enumerators and collections, the sequence library, and laziness. Clojure Data Structures - Part 1: <http://blip.tv/file/707974> Part 1 of an informal introductory talk/screencast covering Clojure's data structures by Rich Hickey, the author of Clojure. Covers numbers, symbols, keywords, lists, vectors and maps. At the 2008 JVM Language Summit he gave a talk, at the 2009 a keynote, "Are We There Yet?": [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich- Hic...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hickey) Check Infoq for other items as well. The Full Disclojure videos have helped [ the author if this note ] understand some of the features new to clojure in 1.1: <http://www.vimeo.com/channels/fulldisclojure> ~~~ jacquesm I've bookmarked your comment, thanks a ton. ------ yuan Sounds like you'd enjoy "Practical Common Lisp": <http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/> ------ keefe I'll just throw this out there because it's not in the mainstream, but Mathematica is well worth considering if you are still @ uni and can get it for cheap. The advantage is that mathematica is a very powerful language for doing "mathy" stuff and you can get some nice results very easily - for example, fractals. <http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/> ~~~ RiderOfGiraffes And if you can't get Mathematica, Sage/Python/NumPy is a good alternative package. ~~~ keefe thx I'll have to check those out, my mathematica license is gone :[ ------ gtani Here's a micro reading list on FP(cut/pasted from another thread). The Cesarini/Thompson Erlang and Halloway clojure books are really excellent, tho it should be noted that clojure's a fast moving target and lots has happened in release 1.1 that promote new coding techniques. \-- Cesarini/Thompson, Erlang ; Logan, Merritt, Carlsson, OTP in action \-- Halloway, Clojure (supposedly, besides the Manning MEAP PDF book, another Manning and a Apress book are in preparation) \-- Scala: (all 3 books out look pretty good, tho I haven't spent a lot of time digging in, and haven't decided if scala's language syntax is denser than clojure's; The Odersky/Spoon / Venners is the largest and not an easy book to get thru, but probably authoritative. The Payne/Wampler text freely available online <http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/> \-- haskell: Real World. content freely available online. <http://book.realworldhaskell.org/> ------ misterbwong If you're a .NET guy by trade like myself, you might want to consider F#. ------ fiaz Erlang ~~~ Ixiaus I picked up an amateur understanding of Erlang earlier last year and have been teaching myself Scheme for the last five months with _The Littler Schemer_ and _How to Design Programs_. I highly recommend both, Clojure seems like a good choice but I've never been crazy about languages built on top of the JVM...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Behind the Scenes at Facebook: Scaling Up FBChat Using Erlang - Anon84 http://education.sys-con.com/node/634250 ====== jfarmer FWIW, this is just a republication of a 3-month-old blog post: [http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=14218138919&id=...](http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=14218138919&id=9445547199&index=2) ------ KirinDave I'm surprised to hear that they're using the alt erlang-thrift binding in production. In Powerset's application of it, it begins to rattle and break down when you push it about 90r/s. I wonder if FBChat's per-connection load is lower than that? Thrift is a great idea and I've used it alot, but it's frustrating to see it so tied to C++. The idea of code generation for your IDL interfaces is so last decade. We've got experimental thrift bindings that treat the IDL as a runtime-compiled source, so on the Ruby or Erlang side you can use their dynamic strong typing to avoid the necessity of code generation that the C++ side suffers. ~~~ ComputerGuru Current fbChat loads are really bad. I believe there's some sort of prioritization going on - connecting from a "3rd world" ISP to Facebook gives me some really bad lag and disconnects, while going through a VPN (server in LA) provides much better response times. If it were just this one ISP, I'd blame it on them; but in my months of using fbChat, I've noticed some clear scaling problems for their "real-time" service compared to the other, more static parts of their site. Obviously this isn't a scientific study in any way, but fbChat has always been a bad performer. ~~~ neilc Does anyone actually _use_ Facebook chat? Leaving aside the details of the implementation, chatting via the FB web interface seems terribly awkward. And while _I_ can use XMPP, most of the people you'd be chatting with won't be. ------ stcredzero Wow. Testing with a "Dark Launch." Basically, they used cycles from every user machine with an open Facebook page to do their load testing by distributing a version of their app with no UI and a test script. This is very powerful and kind of scary. ~~~ arockwell Google did something really similar with their gchat launch on Orkut. They started out with just 1% of the userbase running it in the background and scaled it up from there till they were confident that the implementation details were mostly worked out. Its really a great idea for testing the scalability of new features without completely breaking the production site. ------ axod I wonder what their stats are like so far. Are people using it to chat?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value - ayanai https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-03/tesla-passes-ford-by-market-value-before-musk-delivers-model-3 ====== dan1234 Interesting, but market cap isn’t everything - FTA: "While Tesla’s market capitalization has swelled in size, Ford still overshadows the Palo Alto, California-based company in most other financial metrics. Over the last five years, Ford has posted net income totaling $26 billion, while Tesla has lost $2.3 billion. Last year, Ford had annual revenue of $151.8 billion compared with Tesla’s $7 billion. And when it comes to car sales, Tesla sold 40,697 vehicles in the U.S. last year, according to researcher IHS Markit. Ford sells that many F-Series trucks in the U.S. about every three weeks." ~~~ crabasa > Over the last five years, Ford has posted net income totaling $26 billion, > while Tesla has lost $2.3 billion. Ford: "We have no idea how to invest this money. I guess let's just put it in the bank." Tesla: "We have so many idea for investments, we're only constrained by cash. Let's go back to the capital markets!" ~~~ shawkinaw More like Ford investors: "Let me soberly evaluate the company's present and future financial situation before I make any commitments" Tesla investors: "TAKE MY MONEY" ~~~ pembrook Dead on. The price of Ford is predominantly being determined by institutional investors with a strong understanding of the dividend discount model. Investors moving the market on Ford are buying/selling what they believe to be a stable, mature company and are pricing pretty much ZERO potential for innovation into Ford. Tesla on the other hand is a darling of retail investors attracted to the marketing machine of "Silicon Valley disruption" and they have already priced in a belief that Tesla will win the global automotive market. DDM? What's a DDM? Meanwhile Ford, GM, and all the other automotive incumbents are investing in the same technologies as Tesla. Is it more likely that Tesla never falters (even slightly)? Or is it more likely one of the 10+ incumbents surprises with a self-driving/electric success? I know where I put my money. Interest rates will be climbing at the exact same time as Tesla will be attempting to expand their market to a larger audience who always purchase new cars with an accompanying loan. Oil prices are showing no indication of climbing again for years to come. Consumers have just replaced their aging vehicles in record numbers and won't be in the market for a new one for roughly 7-12 years. Good luck Tesla. ~~~ zxcmx Right so for Tesla to make sense, it has to make the iPhone of cars with Ford analogously in the position of Nokia. It looks like that's the expected level of disruption priced in right now. (Personally I have no idea whether this is likely or not). ------ peterbonney Former finance professional here: Ford is actually worth 3 times as much as Tesla, once you factor in debt. The total value of the Ford capital structure ("enterprise value") is about 150 billion. When two companies have wildly different capital structures, you have to compare them on enterprise value, not the market cap of their equity. So while I give kudos to Tesla for building a valuable business, it still has a long way to go to catch up to Ford. ~~~ robzyb [edit]: Current finance professional here. > When two companies have wildly different capital structures, you have to > compare them on enterprise value, not the market cap of their equity. So > while I give kudos to Tesla for building a valuable business, it still has a > long way to go to catch up to Ford. That is not necessarily true. Market cap and enterprise value are two equally valid ways of measuring value or worth. There are even more ways to measure value, such as DCF or value of assets. All of these have their pros and cons. In this case, my personal opinion is that market cap is a very meaningful way to measure Tesla/Ford and that it's noteworthy that Tesla has passed Ford. I think it is very meaningful because it (loosely) implies that the present value of Tesla's profits (i.e. net profit after tax) is higher than Ford's. Even on a risk-weighted basis. Or, at least, that's roughly-kinda-sorta what the market believes. I would argue that enterprise value would be more meaningful that market cap if we were talking about which company was 'bigger'. However, the interesting thing here is that Tesla has become more 'valuable' than Ford, for this definition of value. ~~~ aerovistae Current amateur here. I feel like there's only one important thing to consider when comparing Tesla and Ford as investment opportunities: is their value likely to increase? With Tesla, there's an obvious path for potential massive growth. It's not guaranteed, but the potential is obvious. With Ford, it's like any other auto manufacturer. What surprises are we expecting? What new products or innovations? Does Ford have _any_ path, even hypothetical, to massive market share growth relative to its current position the way Tesla does? It seems clear to me that the answer is no. Even if their Bolt is a success, they're not about to dominate the market, double their sales, and double their stock. They don't have any Model 3 type event on the horizon. So all these comparisons of financial metrics on current value, to me, seem pointless. This is the only thing that should matter (along with whatever analysis you want to use to gauge whether Tesla is likely to be able to _execute_ on its plans, which is a more complex question-- but performance so far makes it clear that they are experiencing steady and dependable growth of production and sales with clear, well-defined plans for further future growth.) ~~~ traviscj Irrelevant nit that doesn't undermine your point: the Bolt is made by Chevrolet. ~~~ aerovistae Totally forgot, sorry. Right you are. ------ sxates I think these comparison's to other car companies really miss the mark. Those who are long on TSLA (myself included) aren't looking at them as a car company. Tesla is cracking open new markets in the following areas: \- Electric Cars (most visible. Also don't undervalue their unique direct sales channel, which is a huge competitive advantage) \- Batteries/Energy Storage (not just cars - utility scale energy storage, with capacity coming online that will double global output of lithium batteries) \- Solar panels and solar roofs (both residential and commercial, a market with a hockey stick growth curve coming) \- Self-driving AI (head to head with Google on one of the most fundamental changes to transportation our society has seen in a century, and they have the hardware driving around us all the time already, rapidly learning and improving) Ford, GM, et al are irrelevant and poor comparisons. This is SpaceX for Terran energy and transportation. ~~~ chipperyman573 What makes you think solar is a hockey stick? I'm not saying you're wrong it's just the first time I've heard this before. ~~~ sxates The price has been rapidly decreasing in the last 10 years, to the point that it no longer makes sense to _not_ have solar everywhere. It's cheaper than coal, and will soon be cheaper than all the other fossil fuels as well, and will continue to go down, never up. China now employs over 1 million workers making solar panels. And they're ramping that up as fast as they can, and shelving coal power plants. We've reached that critical tipping point for PV solar to go vertical, and Tesla/SolarCity just built their own factory in Buffalo to take advantage. ~~~ legolas2412 I think solar is the future, but these claims are stupid. > "to the point that it no longer makes sense to not have solar everywhere. > It's cheaper than coal, and will soon be cheaper than all the other fossil > fuels as well, and will continue to go down, never up." Then the market should automatically have shifted to 100% solar by now. Solar is getting cheaper yes, but it is dependent on hours of sunlight available, which like wind energy, is unreliable and doesn't work at periods (like night). Further, the capacity of a solar power plant isn't its produced electricity, because the capacity is mainly peak capacity, which is only reached a few hours a day. > China now employs over 1 million workers making solar panels Don't know where that figure is from, but I guess china must be covered in solar panels by now. 1 million is large number of people. Unless your figures are deceiving. For example, walmart sells solar panels. So, you will count every walmart employee as a solar panel retail employee. ~~~ sxates >Then the market should automatically have shifted to 100% solar by now. 65% of new capacity in the US last year was wind or solar.[1] The world doesn't change overnight, but expect that trend to continue. Renewable energy growth is only being slowed by lack of storage. As battery production and other storage techniques come online, it allows higher and higher % of energy to come from renewable sources. >Don't know where that figure is from, but I guess china must be covered in solar panels by now. Pretty good summary of the situation here: [2] "In 2015, China installed half of the world’s wind power and a third of its solar photovoltaic capacity. Last year, solar capacity jumped 81.6 per cent and wind capacity grew 13.2 per cent. Greenpeace has said that China’s renewable energy growth rate is equivalent to installing one wind turbine and covering one soccer field with solar panels every hour. Five of the world’s top six solar manufacturing companies and five of the 10 biggest wind turbine companies are in China. By 2020, half of the country’s new electric generation will come from solar, wind, hydro and nuclear power." [1][https://www.ferc.gov/legal/staff-reports/2016/dec-energy- inf...](https://www.ferc.gov/legal/staff-reports/2016/dec-energy- infrastructure.pdf) [2][http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2017/03/03/will-china- take-the-...](http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2017/03/03/will-china-take-the- green-mantle-from-the-u-s/) ~~~ legolas2412 USA is a saturated market, where renewables are given incentives by the government (unfortunately it won't be so any longer). Look at developing countries, only a fraction of new energy sources for India are solar, even though our coal is inferior quality. I'm pretty sure that coal is still cheaper than solar ------ chefandy Wasn't overvaluing the potential of newer companies over established institutions with significant holdings one of the hallmarks of .com bubble ridiculousness? I'm not particularly knowledgeable about finance and economics– if someone that is knowledgeable has some insight, I'd love to hear it. ~~~ mikeash Totally. Just look at the ridiculous valuations here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot- com_bubble#List_of_compani...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot- com_bubble#List_of_companies_significant_to_the_bubble) On the other hand, there were some major successes as well. Amazon got its start in the bubble and is now gigantic. eBay is doing great. So is PayPal (which is relevant here, since without PayPal we wouldn't have Tesla). Sometimes these ridiculous valuations are completely unjustified, but sometimes they do come true. Figuring out which is which ahead of time is, well, hard. ~~~ giarc Cherry picking a piece or two from your link. >Books-a-Million - Saw its stock >VA Linux - .... They set the record for largest first-day IPO price gain; after the price was set at $30/share, it ended the first day of trading at $239.25/share, a 698% gain (9 December 1999) I don't think we are quite in the situation where valuations are based on updated websites. Nowadays it seems like monthly active users drives valuations which when your revenue is ad based, is a smart metric. In Tesla's case, they are actually shipping cars. ~~~ mikeash Agreed. During the dot-com bubble it seems like a lot of stock was driven by abject cluelessness and investors' perceived need to get in on _any_ stock with .com in it. These days, it's more like excessive optimism. People actually understand this stuff, at least vaguely, and if they're getting it wrong it's just because they don't see the downsides. ------ dabeeeenster Bill Ford gave a talk at SXSW, and I asked him the question "Why hasn't Ford built the gigafactory". He gave IMHO a really weak answer about how they weren't sure the economics of it worked out. Big car OEMs have so much invested in terms of R&D, brand and emotionally in the combustion engine that I think most are just not going to be able to make the jump to EVs. Nissan and BMW are trying, but they are still making really baby steps. ~~~ hammock He's right, the economics don't work out for a Ford. They only work out for a smaller, separately owned disruptor. Inevitable truth and pattern seen across all mature industries ~~~ dabeeeenster That makes no sense to me - can you explain further? Why don't Ford produce a 60KWH car as cheaply as they can? ~~~ erikpukinskis The dealerships won't sell it. Any marketing they do for it will hurt their other brands. Any marketing they do for their other brands will hurt it. It's like McDonalds selling an organic, grass fed burger. If they talk about the quality of the beef, they're basically saying the Big Mac is low quality beef. ~~~ jhpankow Interesting they haven't done a sub-brand like a Saturn or Scion. ~~~ erikpukinskis The sub-brand still messes with their marketing. Why do you think there is so much anti-Tesla astroturfing? There's no point in starting a sub-brand if you're just going to have to astroturf it. ------ nickpeterson This headline reads like a race between Nicola Tesla and Henry Ford, with some Musk character unable to get a third revision done. ~~~ ff10 Continue in the same vein: Musk works for Tesla. ------ hodder Can anyone long the stock who is bullish about the future growth of production, cars, batteries etc write down some quick napkin math on future expectations that would justify your investment at this valuation? I have yet to hear a bull case with any actual math behind it, but am willing to hear you out. Something like: cars sold by yr, Margins. battery wall, solar sold by year. Margins. multiples assumed on revenue and earnings by yr, and at mature phase. dilution of equity assumed to scale production. Can someone address those things without hand waiving them away for me? Again, I'm not long or short the stock, but havent heard a coherent argument with math for going long. ~~~ paulpauper The thing is, Wall St. already factored all that stuff into their valuation and determined that the 'fair price' is $290/share (as of today). Tesla's car business is quite profitable and has huge growth...that's what matters [http://greyenlightenment.com/another-correct-prediction- tesl...](http://greyenlightenment.com/another-correct-prediction-tesla) In the late 90' during the tech bubble, companies that had negative cash flow operation were bid to the stratosphere. Tesla and Amazon however have positive cashflow for operations and huge growth. People said the same thing about Facebook in 2012-2013 and Google in 2004-2005: how will they (Google and Facebook) justify their valuations? Well, they did. Wall St. sometimes get it terribly wrong (Infospace in 2000) and other time very right. Sometimes it doesn't make sense...but there is a method to the market's madness. ~~~ jm__87 lol @ "but there is a method to the market's madness." It is just supply and demand. More buyers than sellers => price goes up. More sellers than buyers => price goes down. Not all buyers need to be smart and informed. I think Elon Musk will do great things with Tesla but I would never buy that stock... it is purely a gamble. ------ brohoolio Ford's F-150 truck line is a fortune 50 company by itself. Two factories. It's kind of insane. ~~~ na85 And yet the rest of Ford's lineup is a snoozefest, even the Mustang. ~~~ supernovaqq My Focus ST is pretty sweet ~~~ chrisper Isn't that one built in Germany? ~~~ selectodude Focus ST is made in Michigan until 2018 when it moves to Mexico. ~~~ chrisper I was thinking of the RS! ------ andy_ppp I would agree with the market that Tesla has the _potential_ to be far far larger than Ford should things go well. If they manage to get to 500000 cars and full automation within the next year, they'll be worth even more than their current market cap. Remember that Tesla have by far the best dataset for building self driving cars and this is going to give them a huge time to market and/or safety advantage over their competition. If they launch an Uber clone as well (which they have implied they might) I think they _could_ be able to replace a lot of car journeys with their service instead of paying drivers, something Uber's lofty valuation is entirely based upon. ~~~ LordHumungous >If they launch an Uber clone as well (which they have implied they might) Lol. Yes, the second most unprofitable tech company in the world should clone the first most unprofitable tech company. Why not. ~~~ andy_ppp Because Uber's value is all based upon self driving cars, as I said in my comment. ------ simonsarris Ford is sitting on almost $16 billion cash. Tesla, like Amazon, burns through cash as fast as they can turn it into _scalable future stuff._ Whether you consider this good or bad depends on your future outlook: Being long Ford is making a bet that the future will look pretty much the same. Being long Tesla is making a bet that the future will look different. (Plus the risks of believing that they can do what they say they can, and that their vision is more correct than not) If you are a Ford investor and want Ford to be investing in the future, you should be ashamed of them for being either too scared or too stupid to know what to do with their piles of money. Then again, the largest carmakers in the US (incl. Ford) were making a _loss_ just a few years ago, and unlike Tesla, they were making that loss while doing ZERO to invest for the future. So maybe Ford should be scared. Or maybe they should be pivoting faster so they don't return to not-making-a- profit, because unlike Tesla, they _still_ aren't spending very much on the future, are they? We can argue about whether or not Tesla has a good plan or a bad plan, but Ford has shown before that they more or less have "No plan." Their reliance of SUV profits almost killed them in the mid 2000's (and did mortally wound GM, only to be resurrected). Will Ford's reliance on the F-150 (or on ICE expertise while outsourcing most other things) do the same thing in the future? ~~~ I've been holding Tesla for a long time. Currently I'm more optimistic about the company than when I bought it, which seemed fairly risky. I think the room for growth and market expansion (Important Electric Things and energy future) is very large. I think trying to compute how the math will get there is a mistake, short of making sure that they are not going to run out of money. Being long technology stocks is a strange game. If you're long IBM or AAPL right now, you're more or less betting that the future is going to look pretty much the same, just like with Ford. It's almost a misnomer to call them technology stocks. There are only a handful of public companies you can bet on (Tesla and Amazon are probably the most obvious) that are really betting _big_ on the future. The dividends of these will be unknown. (This was part of a previous small discussion about the price of TSLA last night: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14018954](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14018954)) ~~~ mcguire " _Being long Tesla is making a bet that the future will look different._ " No. Being long Tesla is making a bet that the future will look like Tesla, that Tesla will be producing a very significant chunk of the vehicles on the road sometime in the reasonably near future. Tesla currently has plans to expand to produce 0.5 million vehicles per year in the 2018-2020 time frame; Ford currently produces 2.5 million vehicles in the US for ~15% of the market. Disclaimer: I'm on my second F-150 and third Ford vehicle. ------ tahoeskibum I've been expecting this ever since I test drove a Tesla last year and got the same feeling I got back in 2008 when I saw an iPhone 3G. The market isn't betting on just another car company but on. car + energy (electricity instead of gas) + TaaS (Transportation as a Service). Tesla has a tremendous headstart on this and in 5-10 years I expect a bloodbath like the smart phone wars, with a only 2-3 main players left e.g. Tesla:Apple::Waymo:Android. ------ aphextron Ford has dozens of production facilities across every continent on earth producing millions of vehicles a year. How can Tesla possibly be more valuable? ~~~ jernfrost It is all about who owns the future. E.g. how much would you value the stock of SpaceX competitors now that SpaceX can fly reused rockets? Doesn't matter how many factories these guys have. They will be destroyed because they will never be able to compete on price, with somebody who can just refuel their rocket while you have to build a whole new one each time. People value stocks based on what they think the future holds. ~~~ briandear Do you actually think other rocket companies won't be able to do that? Tesla doesn't have a monopoly on the future. Also SpaceX isn't Tesla. ------ rottyguy I think people are betting more on Elon then they are on TSLA. As an aside, he strikes me as someone who's been told he has some short measure of time left to live and is trying to make the most of it. By all measures, he's swinging for the fences. ------ rebootthesystem My prediction has always been that all traditional car manufacturers will jump into the market with gusto at the next inflection point in battery technology. The current state of the art battery technology for vehicles is heavy and has less than desirable energy density. The minute a new technology can deliver twice the energy density at the same or lower weight and lower cost most established car manufacturers will jump in. Electric cars are very easy to build when compared to IC cars. The simplest fact being that you are eliminating thousands of mechanical components and replacing them with an electric motor and hundreds (or thousands?) of electronic components (for motor control). Electronics design and manufacturing is easier, cheaper and faster than mechanical manufacturing. I believe Tesla is positioned to take a big hit when that inflection point happens. They are inexorably married to a battery technology. The Gigafactory, as awesome as it might be, is now a large ship with huge mass that is very difficult to turn around. The next battery technology might very well turn the Gigafactory into a huge anchor for a few years, during which all other car manufacturers, lacking that commitment, are likely to leave Tesla in the dust. ~~~ jernfrost When that change comes the other players will have the problem that they too will need to build some sort of Gigafactory. There is no way they can do a rushed attack against Tesla on this. These guys are slow movers not willing to take big risks. When this battery technology switch happens I am pretty sure Tesla will actually be the first to move. They will have more experience with large scale battery production than the competition. It isn't just about cells but putting them together and designing a whole battery, with cooling and everything. Tesla knows very well how to do this. The competition doesn't. ~~~ Jtsummers They could also buy from the gigafactory, just like Apple buys components from Samsung (their competitor within, particularly, the mobile market). Google licensed their search engine to Yahoo and others. Tesla is not in a position to replace Ford and others, and they won't be for several years. Even then, they won't be in a position to displace anyone in anything other than _consumer_ vehicles. They have no truck and no announcement for a truck. They have no busses. They have no heavy equipment. ------ karpodiem This is a perfect slice of Americana here. I can't find a number through Google but the number of Ford Hourly/Salaried employees has to be over 125,000. As a guess. Tesla has 30,000 hourly/salary employees. Despite being valued 'less' Ford has a huge economic impact for many peoples lives. This may decline, over time, but don't be surprised if Ford/GM/Chrysler combine forces for a huge battery factory of their own. Their ability to tap capital markets with lower interest rates than Tesla is a competitive advantage. They also move many more vehicles than Tesla and get better prices from suppliers, which is a competitive advantage. Tesla's gambit with batteries is either going to work or will offer a fantastic opportunity to pickup a battery factory at a good price. At the of the day, when all major automotive companies have EV vehicles, what's going to differentiate them? The accuracy of the self driving software? Entertainment options within the vehicle? Serious question. ~~~ tachyonbeam > don't be surprised if Ford/GM/Chrysler combine forces for a huge battery > factory of their own. They could do that, but they haven't really woken up to the huge threat to their markets that electric cars are posing. They still believe that ICE cars are what people really want. Ford has just announced now that it will begin designing hybrid vehicles. They're a few years behind. If they decided now that they're going to fund their own gigafactory, it would only be ready in 4-5 years. Where do you think Tesla is going to be then? If things go as planned, in 4-5 years, Tesla could have sold 2+ million Model 3's, and be on its way to more new models. > when all major automotive companies have EV vehicles, what's going to > differentiate them? The accuracy of the self driving software? Entertainment > options within the vehicle? Serious question. \- Better performance. The Model 3 isn't a model S, but you can be sure that it will kick the Leaf and Chevy Bolt in the balls. \- Slicker looks \- Brand appeal. Don't underestimate this. Think Apple. \- A supercharger network that's already in place. Other vendors all have major catching up to do. Another thing to consider is, Tesla has a lot of expertise and an EV designed from the ground up to be electric. Other vendors can't just come up with that tomorrow. It takes time to design and refine a product. IMO, by the time Ford really wakes up, they will largely be fucked. Not just because of Tesla, but because all other vendors are already ahead. ------ abakker Of the major automakers, Toyota probably has the furthest behind ICE platforms. The 5.7L V8 and the 4.6L v6 are 10 years old, and very fuel inefficient compared to the the engines from ford or GM. I think that Toyota really has the most to fear in this case, since they haven't had any success bringing out more efficient ICE/Drivetrains to match the competition, and haven't really managed to scale the hybrid efficiency past the sedan market. ~~~ skoocda In the truck/SUV/CUV segment, the engines are dated- sure. But that segment barely exists in other markets, at least compared to small cars. Particularly in Europe and Asia. Regardless, I don't think it's a tech issue, but rather an image issue. Trying to sell hybrid trucks to Americans is like trying to feed boiled spinach to kids. ~~~ abakker Ford has been successful with the Ecoboost, though. And Ram has the ecodiesel. Both viable options. Though the segment is small outside the US, the Article states that Ford alone sells 40K trucks every 3 weeks. ------ mvpu Comparing Tesla with Ford is like comparing Ford with (GM + Shell + Hertz). Tesla is an energy company not an automobile company. It plans to sell you new ways to capture (solar panels), store (power wall), and consume (cars) energy. It also plans to make cars fully autonomous and ownership free. Ford will obviously compete with Tesla in some segments is not a primary competition for Tesla. ~~~ thinkling What you said is correct but immediately raises the question "what's the value of that integration?" Obviously GM and Shell have been successful and profitable without being integrated, and it's not clear that merging would yield them advantages. Why do these advantages exist in the electric energy arena? ~~~ mvpu Can't predict numbers but some obvious integration points are... a) on the hardware side a solar panel customer could also buy the power wall (natural extension) and car, which can yield very high LTV per consumer; b) on the services side a fully autonomous ride sharing means low operating cost; c) if Solar City continues to lease out the panels then Tesla could become the biggest solar powered grid network on the planet. ~~~ gph I just don't see a) as happening much. If there are cheaper solar panel or electric cars available I don't see the point in a consumer not going with the competition. Unless Tesla intentionally makes it hard to integrate competitors solar panels into their power walls/cars, which would likely land them in some anti-competitive/monopoly troubles in a number of jurisdictions. ~~~ mvpu Possible.. interesting thing to note is that home owners are more inclined to lease panels than buy them (so retail cost doesn't matter much it appears). SolarCity really took off after it started offering the 0 down lease. If that trend continues, Tesla could potentially offer a blanket $x/month for energy production and $y/month for consumption (cars) and lock people in. We know panel cost and batter cost will go down over time, so the game is likely in selling experiences not entities.. ------ vonkale I think this is mostly undervaluation of Ford. 45B$ marketcap is quite low for that kind of revenue, profits and assets. I mean 12B$ in free cash flow! How do analyst even evaluate car companies? ------ jernfrost Why doesn't this have a huge benefit to Tesla. They always seem to be short on cash, but if you are worth that much shouldn't cash be super simple to raise for Tesla? Why push for high stock prices if it gives little benefits. Seems like a nutty evaluation even if Tesla knocks over the established players in the future. I do in fact think that there will be an iPhone moment where established players who have not taken electric self driving cars seriousness will be eradicated like Black Berry and Nokia. ~~~ spectistcles That's an interesting comparison — we could very well end up in a market where existing manufacturers catch up and vastly outsell Tesla in the long-run (Android), and Tesla ends up as a very successful luxury model (iOS). ~~~ jernfrost Android was not an established player either though. So we had a situation where new entrants like Apple and Google both destroyed the established players like Nokia, Black Berry, Windows Phone, Siemens, Sony-Ericcson etc. There might very well be another electric car maker upending the market, but really I think Tesla has quite a number of years head start now. Building and planning something like the Giga factory took many years. A competitor will not be able to reproduce that in a couple of years. Tesla also sits with years of experience designing batteries now. They have a competency advantage over the established players who mainly know how to make a fossils fuel engine. Each year passing that becomes useless and dead knowledge. They also lack the software development skills of Tesla. They have mostly bought that from vendors. Tesla thus sits with expertise in the key areas for the future of automobile while the competition is very weak in these areas. I predict a bloodbath. 10 years from now I think Tesla will be quite big and the established players struggling hard to hang on. ------ hueving This seems like irrational exuberance levels. It's already worth more than Ford and still hasn't even produced the model 3. :/ ------ tvladeck Not a very meaningful metric. Ford is still 3x Tesla in terms of Enterprise Value, which accounts for how much of the cap table is debt. ------ frozenport Note that Ford stock pays good dividends. You can make money just by holding onto it [https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/13/how-safe-is- ford-m...](https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/13/how-safe-is-ford-motor- companys-48-dividend.aspx) ------ resiros Can someone more knowledgeable explain how is that even possible? Doesn't this mean that the market predicts that Tesla's future earning after discount and after taking risks into account is higher than Ford's? Under which data? Or am I missing something? ~~~ mcguire " _Doesn 't this mean that the market predicts that Tesla's future earning after discount and after taking risks into account is higher than Ford's?_" Roughly, yes. " _Under which data?_ " Data? Data? Never heard of it. This is all gut feelings here. ------ truebosko This is exciting, but Ford continues to be a major player. They just invested $1 billion in R&D in Ontario, Canada. Seems like they are on the right path, but perhaps don't have the flexibility and velocity of a (relatively) smaller company like Tesla. ------ Taek What this says to me is that the stock asset class is broken. The value of a stock is supposed to be the amount of earnings you are expected to receive from it over its lifetime (adjusted according to the risk free rate or whatever). But today a stock's value can be influenced by a cool factor. Stocks that never pay any earnings can have high values (Amazon) and investor mania can out-live any attempted short. There has to be a better way to set up the market. What if stock had an expiration, after which you had to buy it again? And what if, when you short a stock, you get the full face value of the stock and then only have to pay the owner the earnings? Since the stock expires, you don't have to worry about covering both the earnings and the stock price, only the actual earnings. I think the result would be pricings that more accurately represented a company's earnings potential. ~~~ rcMgD2BwE72F > the value of a stock is supposed to be the amount of earnings you are > expected to receive from it over its lifetime Who supposes that? I don't and I'm ready to pay a different price that you'd do. If there isn't a good reason for that, you might be able to take advantage from my position. Now, there are many reasons why I wouldn't price a stock as the sum of its (future) earnings. For instance, a company can be acquired by another and makes a very different business in the combined configuration. Moreover, the acquirer could use the merger to prevent a competitor to enter a very profitable market. Why would you care about the performance of the acquired company if it remained independent? There's no way to estimate the future earnings of a company without knowing all the possible strategic configurations. Growth stocks are bought for potential capital gains, not dividends. (Market) power is much more important than earnings you can forecast. I'm a Tesla shareholder (the stock makes over 90% of my financial assets) and I don't expect a buck of dividend from this company. I intend to keep the stock for ~20 years, which I bought at $25 avg. ~~~ Taek All companies eventually die. Sometimes this can take hundreds of years, but all companies do eventually die. At that point, the stock is worth zero. So if all stock is eventually worth zero, why pay for any of it today? Well, you may want voting rights. But voting rights don't mean much unless you hold a lot of stock, and a lot of stock is non-voting anyway. That leaves dividends and exits. An exit depends on someone having a value for the company, and can almost be looked at as a 'final dividend'. So I would essentially boil the value of most stock down to purely dividends. If you buy it for any other reason, you are hoping that some other person will be willing to buy it from you later. Which means that other person needs a reason (voting power, dividends, or some other business move with external benefits). But my appraisal is that many stocks exist today that have value simply because people think that other people will want the stock. It's inefficient, and at the moment of exit (death also counts as exit here) someone is left holding a bunch of stock that's worth less than what they bought it for. ------ paulpauper Part of this huge surge in tesla stock has to do with enthusiasm over their battery technology. tesla is a battery company that also makes cars, too. I think the share price goes as high as $500 soon. ------ LyalinDotCom Totally relevant news to 99% of us readers who wont be driving a Tesla anytime soon :) ~~~ bronz even years ago, a model s was as expensive to own, all costs accounted for over the span of seven to ten years, as a honda odyssey minivan. they are about to release a car that costs 35000 dollars. ~~~ josefresco There's literally a sht ton of assumptions, and caveats to the comparison you're referring to: [https://www.teslacost.com/model](https://www.teslacost.com/model) Also, the "winner" of his comparison was a RAV4 EV (by about $20K) The Tesla finish mid-pack (behind the Ody) ~~~ lkbm So three years ago, the high-end, not-meant-to-be-cheap $92,800 car was 5% more expensive than the Odyssey according to a decent-looking model (but cheaper according to some reports), and significantly more expensive than the since-discontinued Rav4 EV. Fair, it's not a slam-dunk that the Tesla S was a great purchase if your goal was saving money. I'm pretty sure it' wasn't the best option in that case. The Model 3 sticker price is less than half the S85, though. Short-term, yeah, most people _still_ won't be driving a Tesla, but when I see volume increasing and unit price decreasing, I extrapolate to "Tesla could easily become a major player", not to"this is irrelevant to 99% of us". ------ neom I would say Tesla is chasing it's valuation, Ford earned it's valuation. ------ FilipeRamalho I think that shows how important e-mobility is for the consumer. ------ BurningFrog Maybe it's time to buy some boring old Ford stock? ------ onmobiletemp Where are all the guys saying that this is just an illusion amd that elon actually doesnt know any physics or engineering, but just is a master salesman in disguise? ------ hackuser Often discussed outside HN, but almost never heard here: Many are investing in his relationship with President Trump. At least two major investment banks [0][1][2] advised their clients of it and many other observers and investors think so too. [3][4] Again, outside HN it's not an uncommon idea; just search a news aggregator for "musk trump". EDIT: It's a very serious problem if we lose free market competition, and instead success depends - or even appears to depend - on politics and corruption. Even the appearance will encourage others to take that course, and normalize it. Corruption always exists to a degree, the market is never perfect, but that doesn't mean it's not serious. What happens to startups if success depends on access to politicians? The surge in Tesla's market capitalization corresponds with Musk's public support for Trump, though the stock market in general has recently. Here's the data on Tesla; I recommend just looking at the graphic, which will tell you more: [https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA?p=TSLA](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA?p=TSLA) It's now at it's all-time high (give or take a buck or two), $294 * Generally, around Election Day it was stable around $190, on Dec 2 it hit bottom at ~181, then it vectored mostly steadily upward to Feb 21 (277), then there was a dip and it stabilized for awhile; now it vectored up again starting ~ March 23. today. \---- [0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/business/elon-musk- donald...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/business/elon-musk-donald-trump- wall-street.html) [1] [http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/20/technology/elon-musk- trump/](http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/20/technology/elon-musk-trump/) [2] [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/16/ubs-analyst-says-he-cant- und...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/16/ubs-analyst-says-he-cant-understand- why-tesla-shares-are-up-so-much.html) [3] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-26/musk-s- su...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-26/musk-s-surprising- rapport-with-trump-yields-40-rally-for-tesla) [4] [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/elon-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/elon- musk-is-all-in-on-donald-trump/515562/) ~~~ hackuser @dang, @mods: I don't care about this one comment, and obviously HN is your forum and you can score things however you want. However, please let us know your policies so that commenters can willingly follow them and so that they don't waste their valuable time contributing things that are unwanted and will be underutilized (and in fairness those contributions are most of HN's value). Please be open about it (whatever 'it' is); we shouldn't have to guess. When the above comment was posted, it immediately was below 7 other threads and hundreds of comments, and it dropped quickly since then, despite no downvotes. That is odd behavior; usually new comments start at the top, or near it, unless the user is brand new or has some other problem (I'm in neither category AFAIK; most of my other comments seem to behave within the range of normality). I've seen other recent comments exhibit this different behavior. I see nothing that would algorithmically trigger anything; it's not short, it contains no inflammatory words, no all caps, etc. My guess, based on eyeballing the anecdotal evidence is that mentioning "Trump" is the problem. If you object to it, please just say so. I think it's a bad idea to single him out - his presidency will have a very serious impact on the IT industry, startups, and many broader things that HN readers hold dear. But that's a different issue. Please give us the courtesy of letting us know, whatever it is, Trump or not. EDIT: You objected previously to something I wrote that mentioned Trump, but I wasn't clear what the objection was - mentioning Trump? something else? I responded and asked, but I think too late to be noticed, so I still don't know. I really have no idea what's going on. The thread with my question is here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13880838](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13880838) ~~~ paulpauper I think the placement has a large degree of randomness. Comments with a lot of Karma will rise to the top, and everything else settles in the middle and bottom. ------ readhn Is TESLA now too big too fail? ------ coding123 Somewhat related, when can I hitch my Fifth Wheel to a Tesla 1 ton truck? ~~~ njharman 3-5 years. Truck is probably there next or 2nd next model. Expect announcement after model 3delivery. ------ unlmtd If I actually trusted the derivative counterparties to remain solvent, I'd reopen a trading to put a long short strategy on this. Everybody seems so have missed the glaring fact that the electric transport isn't going to go anywhere; the lucky ones will have good bi/tricycles, or horse/mules and cart. Motorized transport wasn't a product of humanity's sheer desire for it! It was only caused by the incomparably immense oversupply of energy from fossil fuels, which was a one-off. We can just pray that the transition won't destroy us. Electric lights and computer networks would be nice to salvage out of it. Did you think you'd never use a 100mhz CPU again? The suckless guys have the right idea; we need more efficiency and standardization, not bigger frameworks running on faster chips. I want a 500mW workstation with relatively fast e-ink like display. I'd sell billions of em. Sell your (e)cars, buy yourselves nice bicycles. You won't regret it. ~~~ astrange Are there any public ebike companies?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ruling for Apple against Psystar means clone-makers have no legal recourse - envitar http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/nov/14/apple-psystar-cloning-licence-judges-ruling ====== tedunangst Engineering recourse is still an option. Instead of changing Apple's software, change your hardware. But that requires real work.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ember Testing Guide v2.0 - cavneb http://emberjs.com/guides/testing/ Ember now has an extensive guide on integration and unit testing. ====== jinushaun Just finished a big Ember project. Man, could've used this a month ago. The documentation was previously basically nonexistent. I had to rely on StackOverflow. Overall, pretty thorough. I'm glad they included a section on runners. I wish they would include a section on ajax, the run loop and asynchronous tests. Wrapping code in Ember.run just to make tests work feel more like voodoo. ~~~ cavneb We have a page that is being hammered out on ajax testing. It's just not quite there yet: [https://github.com/emberjs/website/blob/master/source/guides...](https://github.com/emberjs/website/blob/master/source/guides/testing/testing- xhr.md) ------ cavneb This was the combined efforts of (github users): \- cavneb \- mattjmorrison \- stefanpenner \- jagthedrummer \- coderstash \- rjackson \- pixelhandler \- kingpin2k \- JulianLevinston \- knomedia \- toranb Great job everyone! ------ kingpin2k W00t does this mean we actually have to start testing our code? ~~~ calgaryeng meh - it is just Javascript. No need to test it. /s ------ real_ate This looks really awesome, i'm going to have to set away some time for this now! Has the EmberConf talk on testing gone live yet? ~~~ iamstef not yet, but keep a close watch -> [http://confreaks.com/events/emberconf2014](http://confreaks.com/events/emberconf2014) ------ simonista Lots of work has gone into making a sane testing story for ember, props to all the people who have worked so hard on this! ------ ebryn Great job everyone! Open source FTW. ------ mattjmorrison Awesome stuff! Good job everybody!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask/Show HN: HNdex, lists to replace spreadsheets on HN - vollmond http://hndex.imnotpete.com<p>Hacker News needs a secure way to create directories of our users and their ideas - "These spreadsheets are always vandalized, abandoned and then forgotten." [1] HNdex is that secure way: all lists and list items are identified by the HN user who submitted them. If pg or patio11 or jacquesm is listed as available to mentor a startup, you can be sure that user put himself there.<p>I plan to unveil HNdex early next week; I've worked on it for a couple of evenings and it's nearly done. I wanted to gauge interest in particular features for my MVP. Here is a list of features I am currently planning to have when I unveil it:<p>* Each user is tied to their HN login<p>* Any user can create a list<p>* Lists are marked as "people" and "not-people" (IE, offers or unused business ideas)<p>* Users can add their own profiles, once, to a "people" list<p>* Users can add to "not-people" N times<p>* Users can remove their submissions from any list<p>* Some form of flagging what vandalism does get through (manual review? auto-delete after N flags? not sure yet)<p>* A "submit to HN" link for each list<p>* Allow users to store more bio information if their HN profile is sparse.<p>I plan to continue improving this after I release, but are there any other features you think are needed for the app to be useful?<p>---<p>[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1794416<p>edit: also, I am unable to post here from work, so I will be responding to feedback this evening. ====== shimon It sounds like you're starting off with a reasonable MVP feature set, but I'm mainly wondering what lists you will have at the start. It might go more smoothly if you pick a few important lists to feature, and maybe even scrape data from the Google Spreadsheets if it's current, than just leave it wide open for us to create lists. Lists I'd suggest featuring: \- Companies Hiring \- Hackers seeking full-time jobs \- Contractors available for hire \- Seeking co-founder There are certainly many other lists that come up on HN, but I'd strongly suggest focusing on a small set of proven ones to feature prominently on your site, with others available in a list sorted by last update time. Also, I'd suggest you work to ensure the featured lists capture enough information to discourage forking them -- for example, you should collect geographic data in the job-related lists, and at some point allow filtering by location. You don't need to support filtering in the first release, I think, but you want to avoid splintering attention from the featured lists due to e.g. "Boston jobs" and "Bay Area jobs" and "New York jobs". TL;DR: this app will succeed if it has a couple of major lists that a large group of HNers use regularly; so it's more important to ensure the key lists have staying power than encourage the creation of lots of little lists. ~~~ vollmond That's a great idea; I'll see what I can do towards that end. Will need a way for those users to claim their entries.. ------ rlpb > Each user is tied to their HN login How does that work, then? Edit: not sure why this seems so controversial. Making this happen is a hack. This is Hacker News. I was interested in the details. ~~~ imurray I don't know, but it would be easy to do. Give the user a long random string that they need to temporarily add to their HN profile about box. ~~~ vollmond Bingo. That's how I am doing it. ~~~ sz Depending on how this thing is used (job threads?), you could also scrape comments off of a thread page that satisfy a certain format. e.g. someone posts #HNdex Title: Rails developer Location: Montreal #End in a thread, they don't have to mess with their profile and sign up for your site (I wouldn't), and they get visibility in comments to people who don't visit your site without having to post twice in different places. Meanwhile you get free authentication and advertising every time someone does this. ------ vollmond Clickable: <http://hndex.imnotpete.com> ------ ludwig This reminds me... I need to start making landing pages for my projects :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
IFTTT enables you to connect the App.net Channel to 50 different Channels - knappster http://ifttt.com/appdotnet ====== federicoweber Here is my recipe to archive my messages on App.net on a plain text file <http://ifttt.com/recipes/53836>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Know When To CDN - Walkman http://blogs.telerik.com/kendoui/posts/13-11-07/know-when-to-cdn ====== willejs "Dynamic Content: Nope." \- not strictly true. Whilst this is true in a lot of cases, especially due to TTLs and slow purge times from edge nodes, services like fastly offer <1 second purge times across all edge nodes, with built in guarantees. This means caching dynamic content is possible in a lot of situations, triggering page cache purges with specific actions on the backend.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
WxPython 4.0.0 Released - mariuz https://www.wxpython.org/news/wxpython-4.0.0-release/index.html ====== mch82 How come documentation for "embedded" GUI frameworks like wxPython is so devoid of screenshots and graphical explanation? Compare these pages... * Overview, [https://www.wxpython.org/pages/overview/](https://www.wxpython.org/pages/overview/) * API, [https://docs.wxpython.org/](https://docs.wxpython.org/) * Demo, [https://wiki.wxpython.org/WxSmallApp](https://wiki.wxpython.org/WxSmallApp) ...with these pages for Bootstrap: * Overview, [http://getbootstrap.com/](http://getbootstrap.com/) * API docs, [http://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/getting-started/introductio...](http://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/getting-started/introduction/) * Demo, [http://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/examples/](http://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/examples/) For me, this difference made web UI frameworks much more approachable. Visual widget catalogs simplify the task of finding widgets or code samples. Widget screen shots help determine if code is performing as expected. ~~~ ornitorrincos because the list of widgets with screenshots are the same as wxwidgets which is in here: [http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/page_screenshots.html](http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/page_screenshots.html) ~~~ TheCoreh Sadly, the screenshots on that page seem to have been last updated when Windows XP was still current (which was 10+ years ago) They're also not HiDPI/Retina, and the whole website design seems to be stuck in the mid-2000s, too. Somehow mobile and web developers got aboard all the new design and interaction trends, but Desktop GUI frameworks seem to be all stuck 10 years behind. If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably because of a lack of capital investment in desktop software. And yet a lot of people don't understand why everyone is using Electron for desktop apps these days. ~~~ ptx > Somehow mobile and web developers got aboard all the new design and > interaction trends Because the new design trends are all about how to adapt to the limitations (and possibilities) of mobile and web. For desktop applications these mobile- first designs don't work very well (see Windows 8) and we already had long- established design patterns that do. ------ Cynox Great work! Finally a stable version working with Python3! I find wxPython highly productive and enjoyable to work with and the wx C++ documentation has always been outstanding. Now the Python docs are also really good! [https://docs.wxpython.org/](https://docs.wxpython.org/) I know that Qt gets most of the publicity, but personally I prefer wx (having written huge applications in wx and only a small one in Qt, but still). Being able to .Bind() anything without sub-classing and the fact that the class constructors normally takes sensible parameters so that no further method calls are needed to set up a widget makes it very fast and compact to generate dynamic UIs with readable code. The work Robin Dunn has done with wxPython is simply massive and he should be known as one of the great open source legends, especially in the Python community! Congratulations on a fantastic release! ------ zwieback I used (and liked) wx in the nineties - didn't know it was still around. Qt is my goto GUI for Python these days, does anyone have experience with wx vs Qt for Python? The samples look like it's all dynamically generated (vs. something like QtDesigner) and that's how we used it way back when. ~~~ cabalamat My "go to GUI" is a web app -- I can't imagine anything I'd write a GUI app for these days. ~~~ IgorPartola Text editor, video, audio editor, system widgets and settings, web browser, terminal emulator, git GUI client, crypto coin wallet, chat client, games, document editor, security focused software a la Keybase client. ~~~ sfifs the point is HTML5/CSS/JS nowadays provides superior UI experience to traditional UI frameworks. In many of the categories above, there are electron/webview based applications that's very popular. Text editor, document editor -> VS Code/Atom terminal emulator -> Google's terminal emulator git GUI client -> GitHub client is electron based chat client -> slack is electron based games -> lots of web based ~~~ zwieback Also, GUI toolkits were never fun or easy to use in desktop development. I've used MFC, wx and Qt with C++, Forms and WPF with C# and Qt with Python. All of those had their challenges so browser-based GUIs don't seem so bad as an alternative. Not a fan of JS but modern toolkits are almost at a point where they hide enough of the ugliness. ~~~ markroseman Never? Dude, Tk back in the day! Compared with all the raw X11 predecessors, it was a revelation for Unix GUI's. ~~~ zwieback True - Tk was quite the step up back then. I still use it every day when I fire up gitk or git gui. ------ michaelmcmillan Seems like the site is down. Here is a cached version: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ght2vB...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ght2vBmKuEsJ:https://www.wxpython.org/news/wxpython-4.0.0-release/index.html+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=no&client=ubuntu) ------ ZuLuuuuuu Does wxWidgets provide any declaration based reactive programming with data binding? Something like WPF/XAML or Qt/QML or any modern web framework provides? Once you use a modern GUI framework with reactive programming capabilities, it is hard to go back to writing the code line by line procedurally to create your GUI and to keep the information on screen up-to- date without using reactive elements. ------ Karunamon This brought a couple of app ideas back to the front of my mind, but also the difficulties involved in shipping a Python app to an end user. Requiring the user to care about the right version of the runtime, their python and library path, etc. is a real pain in the ass for all concerned. Are there any Python projects out there that allow you to ship a "binary" (even if it's just a self contained python with the relevant libraries like WxPython brought in) for people to use? ~~~ Tom4hawk Yes - cx_Freeze. Nice example is Cura application: [https://github.com/Ultimaker/cura- build/tree/master/packagin...](https://github.com/Ultimaker/cura- build/tree/master/packaging) (hint: .in files) They are shipping Python 3.5.2 + required PyQT5 parts + other python libraries. Only Python files visible for users are in plugins folder (rest are bundled[as pyc-s] in single zip file, python interpreter is "merged" with entry .py file as an executable). You can easily download Cura from Ultimaker site and "inspect" result yourself ;) ------ therealmarv I wonder if it makes more sense e.g. for macOS to create a Swift UI and an existing python code base as external process which is called on request. Does somebody knows which API interface specification is most suitable for that kind of communication on a single PC: Swift <-> Python ? For web it easy (e.g. REST) but there has to be other options on a fully controllable code base on your PC (seems my desktop programming days are long gone.. otherwise I would know myself) ~~~ Derbasti Some kind of JSON over sockets (or MsgPack over pipes, BSON over ZMQ, etc.) works pretty well for these kinds of scenarios. ------ dotdi I always had the impression that WxWidgets is obsolete and dying. Nice to see it still active. Out of curiosity, any big or important software written in WxPython? ~~~ acidburnNSA Not answering the real question but we have a lot of little wxPython GUIs driving big engineering design software suites at the advanced nuclear design company I work at. Engineers (mechanical, nuclear, etc.) can grasp it fairly quickly, get their knobs on the screen, and be back to doing their mechanical and nuclear engineering. We got started because the original python guy (me) learned it from a grad student in 2005 via the excellent wx docs and demos collection of examples. Works great and we recently went all Python 3. ~~~ dotdi I realized it's a great tool for quick prototyping, especially internal software, but I was wondering if anybody took it beyond that. ~~~ dagw Not that I know of. Here is a list from the wxPython homepage: [https://wiki.wxpython.org/wxPythonPit%20Apps](https://wiki.wxpython.org/wxPythonPit%20Apps) As you can see much of the list is either 'toy' applications or older applications that haven't been updated for ages. ~~~ bklaasen Chandler is on that list! That's the failed PIM desktop software that Mitch Kapor financed as a hobby project and which was the subject of the book "Dreaming in Code"by Scott Rosenberg. Terrific book, shame about the software. ------ Kliment Unfortunately they decided to pull all the 3.x versions from pypi/pip at the same time, breaking a lot of projects that use pip to install dependencies but haven't yet ported to the new wxpython. I don't really understand why anyone would do that, but eh. ~~~ pishpash 2.9.1.1 is still here: [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wxPython/2.9.1.1](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wxPython/2.9.1.1) Wonder if they think 4.0 is compatible with 3.0? ~~~ jwilk Note that there are no files for 2.9.1.1. ------ fermigier Nice, but I find the release announcement a bit underwhelming. Which of the seemingly minor fixes and tune-ups does warrant such a major version bump ? ~~~ jwilk The announcement is misleading. These are changes since the previous beta release (4.0.0b2), not since wxPython 3.0. Full changelog: [https://github.com/wxWidgets/Phoenix/blob/master/CHANGES.rst](https://github.com/wxWidgets/Phoenix/blob/master/CHANGES.rst) Migration guide: [https://docs.wxpython.org/MigrationGuide.html](https://docs.wxpython.org/MigrationGuide.html) ~~~ HankB99 Thank you. I was wondering the same thing. I glanced at the information and, if I understand it correctly, 4.0.0 is the first release of a ground up rewrite. What's not immediately clear (and perhaps because I did not read the material clearly enough) is if any significant features were added. I wonder because I find it hard to rewrite something without taking advantage of the opportunity to add features. Or perhaps the desire to add features that would be difficult with the 3.x.x code drove the upgrade. ------ phkahler Does this work with Python 3? ~~~ thekashifmalik I believe so. It is tested against Python 3 in their Travis config: [https://github.com/wxWidgets/Phoenix/blob/master/.travis.yml](https://github.com/wxWidgets/Phoenix/blob/master/.travis.yml) ------ cafard I haven't used it in a while, but found it comfortable enough. PythonCard spoiled me a bit, though. ------ amelius My biggest problem with wxpython is that you apparently can't set closures as event handlers. Instead, you have to define a member function, and register it. This makes the process a bit tedious compared to JavaScript. ~~~ ptx The documentation seems to claim[1] otherwise: It also allows the direct binding of events to: A handler method in the same or another object. * An ordinary function like a static method or a global function. * An arbitrary callable object. If it works for arbitrary callable objects it should certainly work for closures. [1] [https://docs.wxpython.org/events_overview.html](https://docs.wxpython.org/events_overview.html) ------ thekashifmalik I think the site is down. ------ rectangletangle I just woke up, and would have sworn the title read "Python 4 Released." ~~~ julienfr112 In view of the pace of python 3 adoption, it could be better to start right now ...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Larry Page: Here’s What’s Wrong With My Voice - spking http://au.businessinsider.com/larry-page-my-vocal-cord-2013-5 ====== tantalor Why not link directly to the post? [https://plus.google.com/106189723444098348646/posts/aqy6DvvL...](https://plus.google.com/106189723444098348646/posts/aqy6DvvLJY1)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Do Apple's app reviewers review applications really serious? - foxmoby They rejected my app with the following reason:<p>--- Guideline 2.3.7 - Performance - Accurate Metadata Specifically, the following words in your app name or subtitle are considered keywords or descriptors: A simple editor and can convert content to a image. ---<p>I changed the subtitle to `A simple editor`, and I submitted again, and they rejected again with the same reason.<p>--- Guideline 2.3.7 - Performance - Accurate Metadata Specifically, the following words in your app name or subtitle are considered keywords or descriptors: A simple editor and can convert content to a image. ---<p>But I changed the subtitle, they still give me the old reason, do they review the app really? I feel they are so perfunctory, I asked them why they still reject with the same reason, because I had changed the subtitle, and then they give me another rejected reason<p>--- Guideline 2.3.7 - Performance - Accurate Metadata Specifically, the following words in your app name or subtitle are considered keywords or descriptors: A simple editor. ---<p>Are they kidding? ====== urda > 2.3.7 Choose a unique app name, assign keywords that accurately describe > your app, and don’t try to pack any of your metadata with trademarked terms, > popular app names, or other irrelevant phrases just to game the system. App > names must be limited to 30 characters and should not include prices, terms, > or descriptions that are not the name of the app. App subtitles are a great > way to provide additional context for your app; they must follow our > standard metadata rules and should not include inappropriate content, > reference other apps, or make unverifiable product claims. Apple may modify > inappropriate keywords at any time. \- "A simple editor and can convert content to a image." \- "A simple editor and can convert content to a image." \- "A simple editor." All fail the guideline. I could barely even figure out your app name from the post, how would a reviewer? How would a customer? Your app appears rejected correctly. ~~~ foxmoby I don't know what's your point, and I think they are so perfunctory. I can accept the reason they rejected my app, but I don't like their work attitude. I sure of that they didn't review my app, and rejected habitually, because I have update that infos, but they still rejected me with old reason, that's so perfunctory, that makes me think they are sucks. ------ justsorneguy Well, name it something else, then, like "Fred" or "Editronulator", and save the rest for the description... ~~~ foxmoby I removed the subtitle, and it's online now. I really think apple app review sucks. ------ kp1 [http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-it-really-sucks- to-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-it-really-sucks-to-be-an-app- reviewer-for-apple-2012-7) Someone with a chip on their shoulder? ~~~ foxmoby Maybe I will write an article like this.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Verizon Will Charge $2 To Pay Bill Online Or By Phone - 3lit3H4ck3r http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/12/29/144444008/verizon-will-charge-2-to-pay-bill-online-or-by-phone?ft=1&f=1001 ====== pavel_lishin I cannot imagine why a one-time credit card payment would be more costly than processing a payment mailed in an envelope.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
ScaleDB cloud storage engine for MySQL - sadiq http://www.scaledb.com/index.html ====== pedalpete I really want to like this, but I think the description on the main page makes things more complicated than it needs to be. If that is the case, then I assume the product is more complicated than it needs to be. 'ScaleDB is a pluggable storage engine for MySQL. It turns your MySQL application into an enterprise-class, highly-available, clustered database that scales dynamically in a public cloud, private cloud, or on premise.' Is this better put by saying 'ScaleDB is a simple way to make your MySQL database scale automatically'? or something like that? You're giving lots of data and stuff, but why is your solution the easiest/best?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
25 Years Later, ‘Crossing the Chasm’ Has Withstood the Test of Time - ohjeez https://medium.com/inside-the-salesforce-ecosystem/25-years-later-crossing-the-chasm-has-withstood-the-test-of-time-628b85d3cfaf#.dt7kythc7 ====== gumby An insightful book, though like most business books (and especially the best business books) it's really a short paper (one excellent picture with a brief explanation) padded out so it will work on an airport bookshelf. This is why there are businesses which simply summarize business books, yet not the same for most other books. ------ pagutierrezn It's a pity that this book has deserved so much attention over the years when the real research that made it possible is beautifully covered at Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers first published in 1962 and updated periodically	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Would you pay a consultant for this service? - _throwaway__ If you have an app, software, or IT solution applicable to law enforcement needs would you hire a consultant who had law enforcement and government IT experience to review your product, make detailed compliance requirements for your product, and connect you with prospective clients? How valuable would this service be to you if you are looking to break into this market? ====== maxhz If I were to start a new venture focused 100% on the law enforcement market, these skills would be extremely valuable. However, I'd probably prefer to partner (in equity) instead of paying cash. Perhaps taking on this kind of person as an advisor. Assistance earlier in the product lifecycle would be useful too. For example, right now I have vague ideas about how deep learning image and video processing could be applied to law enforcement, but I'm not familiar enough with specific use cases to build something. It'd be valuable to talk with a domain expert about (1) what's now possible with the technology and (2) specific problems such tech could solve in the industry. Once the technology has product/market fit, catalyzing distribution via warm intros to prospective clients would also be super helpful. If I know we have something people want, I'd spend money to get more customers so long as the lifetime value math worked out. Hope that helps!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
And Nobody Noticed It Was a Fake Cake - CaliforniaKarl https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/fashion/weddings/and-nobody-noticed-it-was-a-fake-cake.html ====== cs702 Yes, non-edible cakes made of light, cheap materials like styrofoam are routinely displayed at weddings and other ceremonies. One of the layers might be soft, allowing for fake-cake cutting. The hosts know the cake is fake. Many of the guests know the cake is fake. After cake-cutting, the fake cake often remains on display while everyone eats slices of real cake brought in from a kitchen. No effort is made to pretend that the cake on display is real. It has come to be understood, accepted, and expected by society that there should be a _cheap sculpture of a cake_ on display and that everyone should act as if this cheap sculpture is a real cake during the ceremony. How did we, as a society, arrive here? ~~~ ryandrake The same reason people live in cheap houses with crappy aluminum siding on 3 sides, and fake brick material on the front. The same reason people wear knock-offs of designer clothing. The same reason cars play fake engine noise over their stereo system. The same reason people rent Ferraris for the day. The same reason people go on "vacations" where they spend 5 minutes at each destination taking selfies. People care more about the image of something rather than the actual thing. Authenticity is now something to be faked and posted to Instagram. ~~~ EduardoBautista Do some cars really play fake engine noises on the speakers? ~~~ jdietrich Yep. It's pretty much industry standard on mid-range performance cars and trucks. Many manufacturers are moving to smaller I4 and V6 turbocharged engines on models that traditionally had big V8s. These smaller engines provide great efficiency and good performance, but they're much quieter and blander-sounding than the old V8s. Subtle digital augmentation of the engine note restores some of the feeling of performance at trivial cost. [https://www.caranddriver.com/features/faking-it-engine- sound...](https://www.caranddriver.com/features/faking-it-engine-sound- enhancement-explained-tech-dept) [https://www.ford-trucks.com/articles/f-150s-fake-engine- nois...](https://www.ford-trucks.com/articles/f-150s-fake-engine-noise- bother/) ------ philliphaydon Last year I got married in Taiwan, I got to pick between Cake Cutting, or a giant pyramid of glasses. I picked cake thinking I get cake. So come wedding day we have this giant cake next to the stage, we do the cake cutting and we leave. My best friend at the wedding was shocked I had such a large cake, he was telling people at the table it was huge, my group of friends informed him it was fake, he didn't believe them. So he got up in front of everyone, nervously walked across the room to inspect the cake, touched it and realised there was dust on the lower pieces and it was hard, then he went to see my father in law to confirm if it was fake or not. Well it turned out the only real bit was the top bit which was super cheap and not edible, just show for cutting. He was disappointed he wasn't getting cake, after the wedding my wife informed me I wasn't getting cake and I was sad. :( Apparently this is the norm in Asia. ~~~ faizmokhtar Got married in Taiwan > Norm in Asia. That's a huge jump mate. ~~~ puranjay People forget that about 2.5B Asians live in the Indian sub-continent and Middle-East There are no cakes at Indian weddings ~~~ philliphaydon Ok so I asked my co-workers. Muslims = 'no there is no such custom' Hindu = 'we have, its 100% cake, no fake' Christian = 'we have cake' ~~~ puranjay Cakes at actual Hindu weddings is almost never a thing. You might have them before the wedding - at the engagement for instance. But weddings are almost always filled with Indian sweets ~~~ philliphaydon Are you sure? I literally just googled and the first thing that came up was: > [http://thebigfatindianwedding.com/2014/the-essential- > guide-t...](http://thebigfatindianwedding.com/2014/the-essential-guide-to- > hindu-weddings-food-and-desserts) > Many modern Hindu weddings will also have a giant, tiered cake at the > reception that the couple cut and do that whole cake-face-smear thing. This > is an obvious Western influence, but you can keep it in the right cricket- > field at least by doing something like a mehndi or chai-infused cake. Just a > suggestion. ~~~ nonamechicken Living in India for 30+ years. I am hearing this for the first time. In my state in South India, I am 100% sure there is no cake at any stage of the wedding for Hindus or Muslims. ~~~ madcaptenor Does Indian cuisine (and I realize that I'm sweeping a lot of complexity under the rug) include cake? ~~~ nonamechicken As far as I know, cake is not part of Indian cuisine. I am from the state of Kerala (South India). All the bakeries here sell a few types of cakes. Your question made me curious and I started searching for history of cake in Kerala and came across this: [https://www.thebetterindia.com/125658/kerala- mambally-bapu-t...](https://www.thebetterindia.com/125658/kerala-mambally- bapu-thalasserry-india-christmas-cake/) [https://m.facebook.com/tellydiary/posts/600462363372968](https://m.facebook.com/tellydiary/posts/600462363372968) Looks like it started in 1880s. I am big fan of plum cakes that we get in Kerala. ------ scrooched_moose In high school I worked banquets for a major hotel chain - mainly setting up for weddings receptions and conferences. I only saw a handful of real tiered cakes in the hundred or so I worked. What was more normal to see was a real and very well made top tier. This was for the cake cutting pictures and for the bride and groom. The remaining 5-6 tiers were identically decorated styrofoam. After the cake ceremony, we wheeled the rest into the back, tossed it in a closet for the caterer to pick up, and served sheet cake. ~~~ conception My mother has been a florist for 40 years and this is totally normal and has been for generations. I don't understand why this article exists. Everything old is new again? ~~~ windows_tips It's sort of a profile of a local business. ~~~ gowld [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html) ------ taejo About ten years ago my then-girlfriend asked my mother (a retired baker) and me to make a cake for her cousin's wedding. We proposed some recipes to the bride and groom, they chose one, told us how many guests they were expecting. They accepted our quote so we went ahead with the whole hog, three tiers, chocolate leaves and everything; I show up a couple hours before the reception to stack the tiers in place and add the decorations, gold dust and all the rest. But I get to the table and there's another cake! We'd never considered the possibility that we weren't making a "wedding cake", but the bride's family was under the impression we were just making a "cake for the wedding" and they were responsible for buying a "wedding cake" (in this case real, but flavour not a priority). ~~~ smudgymcscmudge That must have been awkward. It sounds like you have them a good price if they didn’t question your price. ~~~ taejo I'm sure I charged very little on top of the ingredient cost since I was an amateur (my mother just provided some guidance, really) and they were family. ------ koliber I wonder if this is a US-only phenomenon. I've been to a number of weddings in Poland. The cake is real! They don't wheel it back to the kitchen for cutting. It's served right there in the middle of the reception hall. I guess it is less elegant than a stream of plated cake slices flowing out of the kitchen. However, you know what you are eating. Can anyone share their experience? ~~~ athenot I got married in the US but had the traditional French cake: the "Pièce Montée", a tower of cream puffs that are glued together with caramel. It satisfies both the flashy tower requirement, and is relatively easy to dish out since it's just a matter of pulling it apart, serving 2-3 cream puffs per person. And it tastes way better than the US cakes which are glorified pound cakes with tasteless super-sweet icing. [http://img.over-blog- kiwi.com/1/29/25/37/20150328/ob_d45696_...](http://img.over-blog- kiwi.com/1/29/25/37/20150328/ob_d45696_piece-montee-traditionnelle-pour- mar.jpg) ~~~ masklinn FWIW a pièce montée refers to any large/"architectual" pastry, so a tiered cake would be considered a pièce montée. The specific dessert you're talking about is the croquembouche. Delicious, but the caramel ones are so damn sticky. FWIW an other common option for pièces montées is to use multiple cakes on supports, which avoids the structural issues and limited edibility of a tiered cake, and offers more flexibility (e.g. depending on layout you may be able to use cakes with pretty different looks and ingredients, or you can create pretty cool-looking scenes). ------ olliej Wedding cakes are such an unnecessary expense - I’m not going to say a rip-off because the impressive looking ones clearly take a ton of time to make - but if you don’t care about them looking like “amazing one of a kind” cakes a regular bakery can make super tasty non-sheet cakes for a reasonable amount. We used the sadly defunct sweet inspiration in SF (sf rent prices happened afaik) and it was I think 35-40/each for three cakes which was fine. Venue was still the biggest expense - I think all up we were somewhere in the 5-10k range which was apparently “cheap” o_O ~~~ TeMPOraL Yes. Weddings are such a ridiculous waste of money that it boggles the mind. In my region, it is customary for the guests to give an envelope to the newlyweds, with the sum of money somewhat approximating the marginal costs of the guests' presence on the event. That is, if all the guests were nice and following the custom, the newlyweds would have recouped a big part of their expenses. In other words, a modern wedding is basically a process of transferring significant amounts of money from the guests to the caterers, photographers and venue owners. Capitalism at its best. ~~~ opencl How are the guests supposed to have any sort of idea what the wedding budget and number of attendees is? ~~~ dempseye No, you only need to have an idea of the ballpark figure for a seat at a table. Then you bump it up by 20% to 50% and apply a multiple related to your own circumstances and level of personal connection to the guest. Then you buy a gift worth around that or just give them money in an envelope. (Some couples make their preferences known in this regard, but generally speaking I would say that giving a well-chosen gift is nicer than just giving money.) It is not quite the algorithmic process I have described, though. It is a matter of custom and manners and therefore people arrive at the appropriate behaviour mostly unconsciously. I assure you that if you personally do not have any idea about this, your +1 does. ~~~ TeMPOraL > _generally speaking I would say that giving a well-chosen gift is nicer than > just giving money_ I feel this is sort of a thing that's false, but you're required to believe it. Looking at it from the receiving end, money is worth more than gift, because a gift will likely be useless, or duplicate, or at best it will lock down the couple's ability to get the equivalent they want (I give you a good toaster you don't like; you'll be inclined to keep it, even though you'd prefer to buy a different one yourself). Money is the best gift, because it's no-strings-attached. I definitely noticed that the shift of preference from gifts to money is happening in the cultural sphere I live in. Of course things may be different elsewhere. ~~~ dempseye That's the thing. A bad gift is worse than money, but a good gift - something that the couple actually wants and would buy - is better because it (a) shows consideration and thoughtfulness and (b) saves the couple the time it would take to go out and buy the item. This is the principle behind wedding registries, of course. ------ peterburkimsher Making cheaper wedding cakes is definitely a good idea. I prefer flavour over kitsch. But I think guests would probably notice if the cake doesn't actually get cut, but a cupcake gets substituted instead. Instead, I think that only baking a top layer and cutting that would satisfy the photographers. Then wheel the fake cake away to the kitchen, and bring out slices of sheet cake to satisfy everyone's stomachs. ~~~ skybrian Ours was the opposite: a three-layer cake where the top two layers were fake. This was because we didn't have enough guests for a three layer cake (according to the bakery), but for a larger wedding, I suppose you could supplement that with sheet cake? ~~~ carlmr >we didn't have enough guests for a three layer cake (according to the bakery) Are you implying that you did, or that your guests really like cake? ~~~ michaelt I read it as "We told the bakery we had 20 guests and wanted a three-tier cake; they told us their three-tier cake feeds 40 people and recommended fewer tiers to save money" ------ syphilis2 Is there a word for this: when the tradition is maintained in form but not in function? ~~~ Yen The word I think of is "skeumorphic", though that's not 100% the same thing here. ~~~ syphilis2 I believe this is the word that best fits. skeuomorphic - Pertaining to skeuomorphs, obsolete design elements which are retained for familiarity or out of tradition, even though they no longer serve any functional purpose. ------ lacker We had wedding pie. It was great. Pie > cake ~~~ lostcolony Oh you pie people. You make me laugh. Cake will always be superior to pie. Yes, I'm sorry. For one very simple reason. FROSTING! Ya'll forgot about frosting! \- Paul F Tompkins. ~~~ 2038AD But the icing is always the worst part! ~~~ masklinn Preach! Icing is marketing, the entire point is to make a shitty cake look less shitty by completely hiding it. Heavy icing is usually deceptive, hiding the emptiness of the actual cake. ------ torstenvl So now instead of the expense of one cake, you have the expense of two cakes, _and_ you have a cake-shaped hunk of styrofoam in a one-bedroom apartment in NYC of all places. Maddeningly absurd. ~~~ robbiemitchell The price of a fancy wedding cake is the absurd part. Even better would be ditching this fake cake thing altogether, but if you’re going for the traditional playbook, this is pragmatic. ------ gwbas1c I thought everyone knew that giant fancy cakes are usually props? Anyway, I wanted a fancy single-layer cake at my wedding, but my wife nixed it. Our caterer ended up making delicious cupcakes! ------ GrumpyNl Nothing todo with the cake, but i would like to see, that the people who prepare my cake are taking all the right steps, beginning with a hair net when its over 50cms long. ------ gadders What happens if the bride and groom don't know and try and do that stupid "smooshing the cake in each other's faces" thing and it's not real? ------ DoreenMichele _That meant $1,000 to $2,400 worth of cake for a party of 160 or so, even though the menu at the wedding location we had chosen came with dessert._ Well, good for her on saving some dough, but 160 guests makes this sound like not only a _First World Problem_ but a rather _upper class_ first world problem at that. ~~~ sp332 We had over 100 people at our wedding. Our total budget was $2,000 and we went slightly over that. You can save as much money as you want if you're willing to give up having the flashiest high-status stuff. Several guests told me later it was one of the best weddings they'd been to because it wasn't all high-strung and demanding. ~~~ DoreenMichele For her second wedding, my sister had a fairly big wedding. She was also part of a two career couple and had lived a long time in the same state. She knew a lot of people. In contrast, I have moved a lot as an adult and nearly 6 years of homelessness taught me that poverty is very hard on your social life. I would have trouble coming up with, say, six people to invite to a hypothetical second wedding for me. I just do not have a big social network of that sort. Congrats on getting a wedding for very little money. But I strongly suspect that knowing 200 people well enough to even invite them to your wedding makes you more upper class than you likely realize. I eloped at age 19. Including rings (bought on sale), dinner and a movie, marriage license, blood testing and cab fair, it was under $300. So you sound like you did amazingly well. Your testimony doesn't change my opinion that a mock cake for 160 guests is a rather upper class first world problem. ~~~ sp332 Oh yeah, gotta adjust for the fact that the article was about NYC/Washington DC and mine was rural New Hampshire. ~~~ DoreenMichele Edit: Redacted. I'm tired and maybe misreading your comment. I'm outta here folks. Talk at you good people some other time. ------ dmichulke Related: "The cake is a lie" is a famous line that happened to become an internet meme (935k google hits when used in quotes) It's also really funny if you happened to play Portal 1 which you should because \- it's really funny (might have said that already), \- educative, \- addictive, \- less than 24hs to play through (more like 6 to 12 IIRC), \- teaches you how to interactively teach concepts without saying a word (there was a great blog post on this topic but I couldn't find it).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Aum Shinrikyo and a Panic About Manga and Anime [pdf] - gwern http://www.gwern.net/docs/2008-gardner.pdf ====== gwern Excerpts: [https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/BhoJHxGf...](https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/BhoJHxGfpvL)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Robotics Exploration Journey - sa-mao https://medium.com/@ou.sarhraoui/a-robotics-journey-introduction-and-context-c5e80f3a717 ====== sa-mao Hello, everyone! I recently started this journey of learning robotics. For now it is only motivated by fulfilling a childhood dream, but I hope it will evolve into something bigger. Now, I decided to document it so I will force myself into commitment. I know it will be hard and long and I will want to quit, but the idea of other people following my progress, helping with their experiences, providing much appreciated critics and feedbacks will help me go further and push myself even more. PS1: I'm also looking for learning materials, maybe good courses, books or articles. PS2: please forgive my modest english, it is not my native or second language.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Opinions of new type of VPN service during beta? - Oeck https://www.oeck.com ====== Oeck Hi everyone, My name is Peter and I am from the VPN startup company, Oeck. I am looking to get feedback from advanced computer users regarding our Port-forwarding feature in our VPN primarily. This is a new feature to the industry and we are looking to make it even better. We are also looking for feedback regarding our Device Profiles feature ( which is again, new to the industry ). We would really appreciate honest feedback from those of you who try it. The whole VPN service is completely free during BETA, so please feel free to register an account and test it out :) Regards, Peter @ Oeck. ------ jlgaddis "Show HN" is probably a better fit, FWIW. ~~~ Oeck Hi jigaddis, Thanks for that. I'll see if I can get it changed. Regards, Peter @ Oeck.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
When Security Takes a Backseat to Productivity - todsacerdoti https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/06/when-security-takes-a-backseat-to-productivity/ ====== Veserv I will echo a comment I made in a different thread about the CIA hack. Why does anybody assume they would be able to protect their systems even if it was their main priority? The CIA works on cyber-weapons designed to surveil countries, disable infrastructure, and destabilize governments. How capable and well-funded should a person or country need to be to destroy an economy or destabilize a government by stealing the CIA's weapons? $1B, $10B, $1T? A team of 1,000, 10,000, 1,000,000 specialists? I think most people would probably agree that $1B is a lower bound for nation- destroying capabilities. You could hire a team of 100s-1000s of offensive security specialists full-time for 10 years with a budget of $1B. Does anyone know of any system or organization in existence that would even be willing to claim they can stop of a team of 1000 dedicated offensive security specialists working full-time for 10 years with a $1B budget let alone put it in writing or have evidence to back up that claim? What is the highest you have heard? Is it even in the general ballpark? I have personally never talked to an organization willing to claim a number higher than $1M and willing to put their money where their mouth is. If nobody is even willing to claim that they can provide an actual defense, let alone having the extraordinary evidence required to backup an extraordinary claim of $1B, why is there any reason to believe that the CIA would be able to protect themselves even if they prioritized the problem? ~~~ hnzix Sure, any public facing system is theoretically vulnerable given infinite monkeys. What I don't understand is why this data wasn't airgapped. I've spoken with enough colleagues in defence to know that plenty of facilities do this as standard, even for tooling source code, let alone a trove of juicy intel data. And FTA "Segmenting one’s network", even my shoddy underfunded local health dept has implemented that one. The CIA didn't even do the basics here. ~~~ Veserv That is missing the point. It is not that infinite monkeys could break in, it is that the NECESSARY level of security can not be met even assuming the best known practical system. Therefore, they MUST NOT use/create such a system since they can not achieve the MINIMUM requirement. There is no point in improving systems from ridiculously inadequate to very inadequate since the system still does not work and you MUST NOT use systems that DO NOT WORK in critical capacities. Like, imagine a world where the Army made tanks out of tissue paper. You could say, "Look at these clowns. Don't they know regular paper provides better defense than tissue paper.". While true, it does not really matter since if the best armor available is paper, every strategy should probably avoid depending on tanks. My point is about looking at OBJECTIVE requirements and evaluating solutions against them. At a basic level this boils down to two questions: 1\. What is the NECESSARY level of security? 2\. Can anybody achieve the NECESSARY level of security? If the answer to 2 is no, then the system MUST NOT be used/created. ~~~ ForHackernews I mean, you can still be a hard target or a soft target. I guess this doesn't apply to unique assets like the CIA, but for your regular old e-commerce firm, you can have defences that wouldn't stand up to a sustained, targeted attack by state actors, but still make regular hackers go steal somebody else's DB of customer details. ~~~ Veserv Soft/Hard only considers one side of the equation, the level of security provided. It ignores the other side which is what is needed or expected. Without doing that you can not tell if you are dealing with soft/hard or tissue/paper. A more meaningful distinction is profitable/unprofitable and, if you really must rely on other people being tastier fish in the barrel, ROI. For example, if company A costs $10K to hit for a return of $100K, but company B costs $100K to hit for a return of $100M, the only reason someone would hit A knowing this information is if they did not have enough capital to hit B. I agree that not everybody needs to be able to withstand an attack by state actors. It is up to the involved and affected parties to choose the level of security needed. However, the highest level of actual security I have heard from people is ~$1M and I would be hard pressed to find any appreciable system in a moderately-sized business where the negative consequences would be as low as ~$1M. Frankly, $1M is chump change in the commercial world. If that is all it takes to compromise nearly any system or organization in the world, then a sizable fraction of the people reading this comment and around 46,800,000 people worldwide have the personal resources to compromise any system in the world. That is terrifying. ~~~ ForHackernews Are you sure there are negative consequences of ~$1M? You're talking a lot about profitable/unprofitable, but you haven't linked to any sources that back up your numbers. Maybe the marketplace just doesn't value security? Customers seem happy to give away all their data to Google/Facebook for free. Equifax got completely and thoroughly owned but it hasn't seemed to cost them anything. Zoom is a security nightmare but keeps getting more popular. Companies aren't going to value security until the lack of it starts to sting their stock price. ------ mlthoughts2018 I think this is backwards. If you want security to be a first class constraint, you must make security features extremely easy to use and ergonomic above all else (even above being secure!). Nobody is going to willingly agree to abandon their productivity or flexibility for your security tool or policy. If you make them choose, security will lose 100% of the time, forever, in every walk of life. You need to stop viewing it as if you need people to sacrifice for security and instead design for ergonomics and usability as the obsessive, #1 priority. This is why consumer password managers succeed (and help people to be more secure!) but internal security teams can’t get anything done in private companies. Your first responsibility is to make something your users want and like to use, period. After you solve that, then, without disrupting usability, you can modify it to actually adhere to security constraints and achieve other results. If I see that a company has an internal security team my first question is, where is the product manager? If you don’t treat internal security tooling like you’re delivering a product, then you’re done. Just go home and watch Netflix because you’re not solving security problems. ~~~ tialaramex > You must make security features extremely easy to use and ergonomic above > all else (even above being secure!). That's definitely not right. The correct security design is that when things aren't secure you fail entirely. This will sometimes be _very_ annoying but the temptation to prefer not failing leads to disaster. Instead an organisation that prioritises security must dedicate resources to resolving the actual security problem as a priority _because_ it is very annoying. For example 'thisisunsafe' and its predecessor 'badidea' are indeed, unsafe and a bad idea. The correct design is to simply fail instead. Which organisation do you think gets successfully phished with invalid HTTPS certificates - the Chrome embracing organisation that has taught people they can just type "thisisunsafe" or the one where everybody uses Firefox and it brick walls when HSTS denies access? > Nobody is going to willingly agree to abandon their productivity or > flexibility for your security tool or policy. This is almost correct. Humans are very lazy. They _will_ give up their productivity or flexibility for your security tool or policy if it's easier than the alternative. For example when your users are trying to give their credentials to bad guys, you need to make this _so difficult_ they give up. You might think you can train your users not to want to give their credentials to bad guys, but this is unlikely to be successful enough to bother. Instead get to a place where your users, even though they really want to help the bad guys, just can't see an easy way to do it. They may even file a helpdesk ticket because they genuinely don't realise what they're trying to do would be a very bad idea. Try not to be smug when responding to the ticket. ~~~ mlthoughts2018 > The correct security design is that when things aren't secure you fail > entirely. Yikes, this is extremely wrong. Security failures should be proportional to the actual cost and consequences. On top of this, you can’t just fail systems in a business. You’ll lose all your customers and go bankrupt. On the other hand, you _can_ allow security vulnerabilities to continue existing. Sometimes you might lose customers or face legal consequences, so you might _have to_ address those security situations, but they are in the rare minority of all security issues overall, many of which you just need to apply expected value thinking towards and treat like any other trade-off. Security is a resource to be traded off against other concerns, not an absolute necessity. ~~~ tialaramex > Security failures should be proportional to the actual cost and > consequences. That's wonderful for Nostradamus, but everybody else is obliged to operate without knowledge of the future. What will the _actual_ consequences be of bad guys being able to send email from the VP Asia Pacific's account to the CFO's office five minutes before close of business? Maybe nothing right? Or maybe an "urgent cash payment" of $48M to secure a take over deal vanishes into a maze of international accounts never to be recovered... Security is a special problem because you have unknown sentient adversaries. You completely lack intelligence about the adversary because you don't even know who they are. Don't think about security decisions the way you'd think about decisions like whether to hire a back-up venue in case the company picnic is rained off. ------ l0b0 When does it not? Seriously, has anyone here worked somewhere security _actually_ was front and center but people were also able to build new things? ~~~ strstr My current job at Google working on virtualization? ~~~ tlarkworthy Don't think it counts. That's a neccisary condition to multi tenancy cloud tech. It's a product feature that customers require and ask for. ------ seven4 From the article referencing the Wikileaks taskforce - _" The CIA acknowledged its security processes were so “woefully lax” that the agency probably would never have known about the data theft had Wikileaks not published the stolen documents online._ If hollywood did one thing well - it was to inspire in me a misplaced faith in the competency of security/government institutions. ~~~ rrmm If you're in search of cure, get a job in government. It's an education both in brute force and ignorance. ------ Lind5 There are big shifts in the economics of security technology [https://semiengineering.com/fundamental-changes-in- economics...](https://semiengineering.com/fundamental-changes-in-economics-of- security/). More and higher value data, thinner chips and a shifting customer base are forcing long-overdue changes in semiconductor security ------ nominated1 I’m led to believe that the CIA is run like Equifax but I can't shake the feeling that this is all a smokescreen. ~~~ tra3 Good point. But Occam’s razor, and Hanlons as well. Given the evidence I’m going to go with equifax. ------ bargle0 The most secure work is the work that doesn’t get done. That is to say, if it doesn’t exist, it can’t be stolen. That’s where security above all inevitably takes us, and the defensive guys get to pat themselves on the back and declare victory. ~~~ unnouinceput that's not security, that's obscurity. don't confuse one with the other ~~~ chaosite No, "obscurity" does not mean "bad security", it specifically refers to the practice of hiding the details of the mechanism hoping that it makes it more secure. Things like "Pet names and mother's maiden names are common security questions, so maybe lets not store those in our employee info database" are valid security considerations. And of course they make the employee database slightly less useful. ------ C1sc0cat The Comment "No effective removable media controls" Is shocking 15+ Years ago QinetiQ used to solder up the usb ports on its lap tops and that's for those working on avowed jobs, not the Secret Squirrel ones.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Android tops 81 percent of smartphone market share in Q3 - indus http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/31/strategy-analytics-q3-2013-phone-share/ ====== VanHamersly I _just_ posted a related link that I'm thinking could be related. Do you think the "Give the people what the want/bigger is better" approach played any role? See the sizes evolve here. They start out very iPhone-ish, but then rapidly increase in size. [http://gadgetlove.com/blog/the-evolution-of-the- nexus-5-in-3...](http://gadgetlove.com/blog/the-evolution-of-the- nexus-5-in-3-seconds)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Best of Hacker News in January 2013 - A curated list - eimarlinch https://www.dotdotdot.me/Mike-Hermann/Best-of-Hacker-News---Jan-13 ====== tikhonj I don't know if it's a matter of the curation or voting patterns, but there were no technical posts on the list. Make of that what you will. ------ cma "Highest-rated articles of January": could you tweak things to display the point-count/comment-count? What exactly does curated mean? Are these hand picked as the highest-rated, or automatically selected based on point-count/some other metric? What does the 'ABC' metric mean? ------ niggler You should add the links to the HN discussions alongside the links to the articles.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Technologies to help prevent abuse of power? - lftherios ====== perilunar Sousveillance. Does anyone honestly think that George Floyd's killer would have been charged if there wasn't a video recording from a bystander? ------ rowawey Stop. There are no utopian technical solutions to human socio-econo-political problems. Please stop. ~~~ ujki1 I think the question is about technologies that help to reduce the abuse of power, even if they don't prevent the abuse entirely.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A free surveillance system that deploys instantly - paulchen http://homeojo.com ====== paulchen This is a home surveillance system that works nicely for those who do not want to buy any camera. I simply put my old laptop there.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
String theorys second life - EastLondonCoder https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160915-string-theorys-strange-second-life/ ====== M_Grey [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12512954](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12512954) ------ shepardrtc Reposting this link that I found in the comments section from the previous time this article was submitted: [http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8778](http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8778) ------ richmarr > String theory has _so far_ failed to live up to its promise (emphasis mine) How long should we wait? There should be a Samuel Beckett adaptation... Valdimir: "Should we start work on some other theories?" Estragon: "Yes let's" (They continue adding dimensions to make their predictionless theories internally-consistent)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
McDonald's staff took offence to digital glasses, inventor says - tokenadult http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/07/17/tech-mann-digital-eye-glass-assault.html ====== ColinWright <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4252955> _Added in edit after tokenadult made his reply:_ _I see that this is, as tokenadult says, a professional reporter writing about the incident. It is, perhaps, of some interest that this story should be taken up by the mainstream press, but it does add very little to the original story. The following is new:_ ... a McDonald's media representatives sent a statement by email saying, in part: "We take the claims and feedback of our customers very seriously. We are in the process of gathering information about this situation, and we ask for patience until all of the facts are known." _It would be especially useful if the media harass McDonald's until a proper response is finally given._ _So that's new, and my bare reference to the original blog post perhaps should have said that. Interestingly, I was prevented from saying that quickly because I was IP banned, and it's only that my modem rebooted and changed my dynamic IP address that I can write this. So I will respect the intent of the IP ban and go "off-line" for a time._ ~~~ tokenadult Yes, Colin, this is the first follow-up by professional journalists to the blog post that launched that busy previous HN thread.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Nokia Dreams Of Shipping 200 Million Windows Phones - NonEUCitizen http://www.businessinsider.com/nokia-windows-phone-transition-will-take-two-years-2011-3#ixzz1GL7CSE5O ====== electromagnetic I dream of sending 200 million rocket ships to Mars. I find it hilariously stupid that they're risking their strong presence in China to go exclusive with MSFT. Why didn't they just go MSFT heavy and keep heavy on Symbian in china? ------ jakegottlieb When I think of best seller I think of the iPhone; I forget how many Symbian based phones are out there.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Morning Coffee - Get Starbucks Straight to Your House - michael_fine http://yourmorningcoffee.herokuapp.com/ ====== patio11 This seems like a curious choice of potential business when no US-based store will deliver a $3.50 product on a regular basis despite having access to large pools of labor at arbitrarily low costs, while if you're capable of typing in "git push" to get that website up your presumed opportunity cost is rather high. Consider carefully whether you are likely to have a competitive advantage in delivery operations over an entire nation of savvy chains and independent operators with high tolerance for jobs that suck. It strikes me as unlikely. If you really, really have a burning urge to do this, be ZeroCater for coffee and sell any three startups on doing an office-wide coffee run every morning for only 15% the cost of a new engineering hire. (P.S. Note how I do not anchor costs around the price of coffee.) ~~~ glimcat > P.S. Note how I do not anchor costs around the price of coffee. Well, neither does Starbucks. ~~~ tptacek Huh? ------ topherjaynes It's Sunday so I've had sometime to think about this and I'd say give it a whirl, but set some goals/paramaters. I will only try this for x months or loss x amount. I'd get creative in how you can generate revenue too besides the demand/customer few. Right now people in the comments are focusing on the scale, well it's a hard product to arbitrage, but 1) Could you sell space on the cups for ads or other start ups? This might be the one time QR codes could work!. A Well placed QR code on the cap?? 2) If you try to cut your costs (ie the coffee) look into a starbucks gift registered card, every x number of coffees you buy you get a free one. Also, once you hit a certain threshold you can customize (add flavors) to cups of coffee for free. Still charge the customer for it, but you get it for no additional cost. 3) It doesn't have to be Starbucks. I'd try partnering with unique coffee shops and try cutting a deal with them. They get people aware of their coffee and grow their customer base. 4)Or just simply use this to meet people doing interesting things. Who doesn't have time to get coffee in the morning--people who are doing things. Who can offered to have someone delivery coffee to them? People who've made money doing something. Best of luck, interested to see what you do with this! ------ arkitaip I can't really see how this mvp can scale beyond a few dozen customers if manual delivery is going to be used (how many minutes do you have before the coffee gets cold? This sets all kinds of limitations on your business). $15 per customer/month isn't much if you're going to pay for (gas), salaries, etc. Unless, of course, this is Starbucks' MVP and they are figuring out the parameters of coffee delivery. _Now that would be brilliant_. ~~~ michael_fine You're right, this really is just introductory pricing for the MVP. We really need to work out what a sustainable pricing model is, but we decided that we should first work on the MVP. Do you have any suggestions? ~~~ arkitaip This is a tricky problem. Will individuals think that getting Starbucks coffee delivered to the comfort of their home is worth the additional fee? Also, the product is fairly price sensitive and delivery has to be done on a tight schedule. Some suggestions: * target businesses. Your orders will be larger, evenly scheduled and the customers are less price sensitive. Expect tough competition, though, unless ... * Broaden/specialize your product range. I assume you've chosen Starbucks because of the brand recognition. But what if you offered _spectacular_ coffee from local coffee shops (assumption: Starbucks produces average coffee)? This could be one of your USPs: great coffee from local baristas delivered to the doorsteps of your customers. * Transportation makes or breaks any type of delivery service. You need a form of transportation that's dirt cheap (no gas), small yet can carry many cups of coffee. I'm thinking a bike designed for cargo, maybe something like [1] ? * Vacuum flasks may solve some of your issues. Why not carry around a couple of these and pour the coffee when you reach your destination? Naturally this would have some implications on branding and product range. [1] [http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/bicycle-cargo- chapter-1-rack...](http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/bicycle-cargo- chapter-1-racks-and-bags.html) [http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/bicycle-cargo- chapter-2-bike...](http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/bicycle-cargo- chapter-2-bike-trailers.html) [http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/bicycle-cargo- chapter-4-carg...](http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/bicycle-cargo- chapter-4-cargo-bike-business-a-l.html) ~~~ Kluny A good vehicle to use would be a T-truck, such as this: [http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4045/5137002465_84fe8b3806_z.j...](http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4045/5137002465_84fe8b3806_z.jpg) They get insanely high gas mileage. ------ chadyj Why Starbucks? Why not setup a barista in a street cart and make your own (and you will also be mobile to handle different areas and sell to foot traffic)? You can skip the Starbucks lines, increase your margin significantly, and work on a better coffee product. Premium coffee is selling for $6.50 and is turning into a luxury item. Source: <http://www.good.is/post/the-end-of-cheap-coffee/> (fantastic article!) ------ richbradshaw The nearest Starbucks to me is 44km away, which makes me think that if you were able to deliver, it would likely be cold. Also, I can't say that Starbucks coffee is nice - seems more like coffee flavoured milk than an actual drink. You can also make perfectly awesome coffee at home, for cheaper than your delivery cost, and you get to use your own cup. For that reason, I'm out. Nice looking iPhone app though. ~~~ cdcarter Strange, the criticisms I usually hear of Starbucks coffee is that their roasts are too dark, giving incredibly (sometimes almost seemingly unnatural) bold flavors without a lot of depth. I don't know a single person who'd characterize even their lighter blends as "coffee flavoured milk." That being said, you're probably well outside the target market for having your coffee delivered to you. If you had time to make it yourself, you certainly had time to grab a cup on the way to work. ~~~ derrida Ask any Australian what Starbucks tastes like and they will say "Coffee Flavoured Milk" or "Watery Shit", perhaps why Starbucks failed hard in Australia. ------ michael_fine EDIT: After all the feedback, I realized I'm wrong. There is no sustainable way of delivering all that coffee at 50 cents a day. So, we've decided to change to $1.50 a day, and ramp up slower. We're starting in the D.C area, but considering moving to the Bay area if demand is significantly creater. Thank you for the help ------ silentscope You could: 1\. bundle your offer with a subscription to a newspaper. Possibly with a large subscription purchase, you'd save enough money that your customers would get a deal for coffee AND the paper while you up the revenue. 2\. add breakfast! smoothies? Breakfast burritos? Those take time, are usually pretty healthy, and are highly portable. 3\. send them a morning playlist??? like a new jazz/downtempo CD of their genre preference to get ready with while they wait? If I'm busy, which is what I'm going to have to be to use your service, I probably don't spend a lot of time getting new music. 4\. have really really good looking delivery people. Nothings gonna make someone get ready faster and better in the morning than that. Hire college sororities/intramural soccer teams? 5\. market yourself to startups that want their folks to come in before just getting free lunch--like a jumpstarter for their day. Maybe they'd pay a bit to see if you can get their engineers in by 9:30-10. 15-20 bucks for an extra hour or two of work sounds like a stellar rate for a top flight hacker... Honestly though man, I'd use this as a vehicle to learn about starting up and not as the roadmap. Take all the gravity out of the situation. This should be a fun experiment to learn how you and your team operates, how you adapt when you're not getting traction, nothing more. I respect the hustle, but this most likely will not work out. If I have time to wait for you to deliver coffee, I have time to make myself some. ------ kylemaxwell If I want coffee at home, I make it at home. If I want to get coffee someplace (and in my area, for better or worse Starbucks is nearly the only option), then I'll go somewhere because I want to see something besides the same four walls and my lovely family. Paying coffeehouse prices plus a convenience fee just to sit at home and save myself the few minutes it would take to make coffee seems like it will have a very small target market, at best. ~~~ corin_ It's different for different people. Every day somebody from my office (it varies who) will drive a mile and back to pick up a few cups of coffee from Costa (a chain insanely similar to Starbucks, if you don't know it - started in the UK, very, very big chain). Some people pay the extra to drink it somewhere else, some pay for the convenience of "I don't have to bother making it", and some pay because they prefer it to what they make at home. ------ TomGullen $15 a month, seems very cheap, is it even possible to run this profitably? Who delivers them? How are they paid? ~~~ michael_fine So, currently my cofounder and I will be delivering them, but probably will ramp up hiring with increased volume. If we serve 300 people day one, $150 dollars is enough for the gas money and a little profit. But we're still working on pricing, so if you have any ideas, we'd love to hear them. ~~~ Alex3917 Unless you're Santa Claus, delivering 300 orders of coffee in a day is flat out impossible. \- First, everyone is going to want them within a two or three hour time period. \- Second, you're going to have to go to Starbucks after every order or every other order or else the coffee will get cold by the time it's delivered. I think you can reasonably deliver 4 per hour, maybe 8 if you get really good at clustering them together. So I think more than 25 per person per day is going to be unreasonable, and realistically probably more like 15. ------ pclark It'd be interesting you did demand delivery pricing, so that pricing became more expensive at peak times (eg: 8AM) that way you can manage the effect of everyone wanting their drink at the same time. You should start hyper local, one neighbourhood in San Francisco - SOMA? Hayes Valley? Mission? If you did it in a hyper local area you might just turn a profit at $1.50 delivery each. I think this would also be hugely valuable to companies, such as being able to order all my teams starbucks drinks in one click. I'm curious why coffee though? Most people do not appear to mind getting their coffee in the morning. Especially as it is so habitual. I hate laundry though! I hate taking my trash out. I hate not getting fresh bagels/fruit each morning. ~~~ michael_fine Yeah, demand delivery pricing is a good idea as well. I did coffee for a couple reasons: one, because I love coffee. 2: Because aside from laundry, it's the most universal. ~~~ corin_ Consider adding other "universal" things that can fit easily on top of coffee. For example I smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, and other than when I remember to buy a carton ahead of time I generally end up going to a shop each day specifically to buy them, they don't fit my general groceries timetable. Somebody already suggested newspapers... maybe a few other easy-to-deliver snacks/drinks (can of coke, crisps..)? I'm sure there's some more things that X% of people are already buying once a day and would like to save hassle on. The more you bring, the more the delivery charge looks good to the customer. Let's say each day you brought me a coffee (at cost), a pack of fags (at cost) and a can of coke (buy in bulk you could sell at retail cost and make some money there), still charge $1.50 delivery fee, but suddenly you're saving me three times as much hassle. ------ maybird Kozmo for Coffee? For many people, part of the point of going to a coffee shop is the social interaction and serendipitous encounters. Good luck tho! :) ------ kaolinite I think the best way to go about this would be to approach businesses in a small area, maybe a couple of streets, rather than targeting an entire city and advertising it online. Create a few flyers and hand them out. That way you can delivery multiple coffees at once which will make your business a lot more efficient. Another thing, if someone gets a coffee delivered for them in an office, all their colleagues will want their coffee delivered too. Word of mouth should work quite well for this business but to be successful, you'll definitely need to target businesses. Oh and finally: why not allow business accounts that let them order numerous coffees at once? ------ philip1209 1\. You don't specify a locality 2\. You could scale this more easily with TaskRabbit. 3\. A flat monthly rate will run you into the ground. Example: I order 10 drinks every morning delivered to my office. Or, if you limit to one drink/day, as head of this company I could buy a year of this for all of my employees, then together they remember to order on a daily basis. ------ corin_ Are you actually planning on buying from a shop and then delivering as everybody assumes? If you are, have you considered: There's a step between being a Starbucks customer and being a Starbucks shop. See for example <http://www.starbucks.com/business/office-coffee> I don't know how costs would improve/get worse, but I imagine it would at least be operationally easier if you could brew on the road rather than constantly having to go back to the shop, and dealing with drinks getting cold. Potentially I can imagine them selling you branded equipment (cups, tissues etc.), coffee (just big bags) and the extras you might need (e.g. syrups), then as long as you made it well, so as not to give them a bad name, they could just leave you to it. ------ bergerj Think a little differently. This guy delivers bagels... [http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/magazine/what-the-bagel- ma...](http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/magazine/what-the-bagel-man- saw.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm) ------ benblodgett I think this app would be most effective in suburbs and not city centers. There are coffee shops everywhere (especially in NY) - it would actually waste time to wait for coffee then it would to walk down the block. ~~~ georgemcbay It doesn't work well in either place. It fails in the city for the reason you mentioned and fails in the suburbs because people live too far away from each other for them to attain any kind of useful economies of scale. ------ EdwardTattsyrup Every bubble needs a webvan. ~~~ watmough Webvan split! edit: source [http://search.dilbert.com/search?w=webvan+split&x=0&...](http://search.dilbert.com/search?w=webvan+split&x=0&y=0) ------ aes256 Even at $1.50 per coffee I'm struggling to see how this will be sustainable. I would guesstimate you're looking at 20 minutes of labour _at the very least_ for each coffee. That includes getting to and from Starbucks, ordering, having the coffee made, and completing the transaction by delivering it to the customer. Each person involved might earn $4.50/hour before costs... ~~~ chris_p I assume they can order and deliver more than one coffee at the same time. By using bags, delivery boxes or something. ------ dclowd9901 I kept thinking the next step was a generalized, personalized, on-the-spot concierge, but this app makes me think the best path to that is to go in through some small service, like coffee, or laundry. I like it. ------ politician Will the Google Car make these sorts of low-value home delivery businesses viable? ------ sunyata Coffee? You're gonna go out for THAT? ------ tobiasbischoff wow, a business model that bets on the lazyness of american people! where can i invest?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How German nuclear scientists reacted to the news of Hiroshima - bilifuduo http://lukemuehlhauser.com/how-german-nuclear-scientists-reacted-to-the-news-of-hiroshima/ ====== Jerry2 Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11579299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11579299) ~~~ tristanj I think you meant dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12568250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12568250) ~~~ codezero It's completely ok to resubmit stories after some time has passed if it helps them reach more people who may have missed the original submission. I don't think this would be considered a dupe. The only gripe I have is guidelines say to stick to original sources so I'd rather see a repost that's closer to the source :) ~~~ tristanj It's ok to resubmit stories after some time has passed, but this one was submitted four weeks ago with significant discussion alongside it. I'm totally ok with stories like this being resubmitted after 3-6 months, but one month is too soon by my mark. Resubmitting stories that don't get initial traction is fine, but this post had a lot of traction when it was submitted last time so it doesn't fit in that category. > _I don 't think this would be considered a dupe._ Have a look here, dang clarifies what is a dupe in this post [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645) . It should clear up why mods marked this story about german nuclear scientists as a dupe. Plus, the try submitting [http://germanhistorydocs.ghi- dc.org/pdf/eng/English101.pdf](http://germanhistorydocs.ghi- dc.org/pdf/eng/English101.pdf) and you'll see it gets caught by the dupe detector. Note that I didn't mark this post as a dupe, the site moderators did that. ~~~ codezero We've seen successful re submissions within days. I'm not on board with getting a pitchfork out after four weeks. I am probably biased because I missed this the time it was posted four weeks ago. Let's agree it's relative. Thanks for the clarifying links though. I'm not upset it was flagged as a dupe. I'm all for HN moderation, just want to make it clear a lot of people probably missed this. If that's ok and we bury this story I am ok with that. Let's resubmit next year :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: GitHub Issues in the Menubar (OS X) - tomgenoni https://github.com/tomgenoni/bitbar-ghissues ====== trepiedle I'm definitely using this	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
We Need to Replace Objective-C - AshFurrow http://ashfurrow.com/blog/we-need-to-replace-objective-c ====== jawngee Unfortunately, this was posted so long ago (in internet time) that this comment will probably never be seen, but some things need to be said, so I'll say them here. Someday, someday soon, writing Objective-C as we know it today will seem as antiquated as writing assembly. That's going to hurt Apple. I'm guessing the last time you wrote assembly was probably for some undergrad CS course and have no practical experience in what writing assembly is actually like. Otherwise, you'd not be making stupid assertions like this. Christ, look at how we're still arguing about dot-notation. Who is arguing about dot notation? Incremental changes aren't the way to get to the language of the future. Don't tell that to the C++ committee. Incremental changes are in fact the way we get to the language of the future. New languages are incremental changes to old ones. Pascal -> ObjectPascal. C -> C++ -> Java -> C#. Ruby was incremental changes to a whole slew of languages. Well, look at Microsoft. They transitioned from Win32 APIs to .Net and the CLR VM and it took over a decade. Microsoft still uses C++ for systems, which is what you are doing in Cocoa/iOS. .NET is mostly a wrapper of API's that are still C/C++ based. What parts of Windows do you think are written in .NET exactly? A new old thing is not really what we need. It seems absurd that 30 years after the Mac we still build the same applications the same ways. 30 years ago we were using C++ to write apps for the mac, Object Pascal before that. If you don't think Objective-C (and the NS* frameworks) isn't a huge improvement on that, then you probably have no idea what you are talking about. It shouldn't use pointers, structs, header files, anything C-based Why? What are you so afraid of? It should be a memory-managed language (No ARC, not retain/release, no Core Foundation) Again, why? You know they did have a GC'd version of Objective-C, but it was such a pile of shit that they dumped it for ARC. It should have native, unicode strings and native collections I've no idea what you mean by this. Native? Built-in collection types? Why are you so intent on robbing yourself of tools? It should be concise Concise compared to what? I can't think of any other systems level language that is nearly as concise as Objective-C. It should have named parameters Yeah, because method signatures aren't concise enough. /sarcasm My biggest question is why you aren't using RubyMotion, Ximian or HTML/Javascript to build apps for either platform? Objective-C is not the only way. With Apple re-writing more and more of the OS in Objective-C (Finder in Mavericks, for example) my guess is your wish won't be coming true anytime soon. Will we be using it in 20 years? Will Apple exist in 20 years? Who knows.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Adeo Ressi: If Common Stock Is Worthless, What Does That Mean for Entrepreneurship? - rowel http://www.pehub.com/38110/if-common-stock-is-worthless-what-does-that-mean-for-entrepreneurship/ ====== alain94040 Market forces are mostly to blame for the devaluation of common stock. When you negotiate that first round with the VCs, it's all about who has more power in the negotiation. A known weakness of the newbie entrepreneur is that they don't know all the tricks that VCs put as hidden terms. That's one reason I like Adeo's initiatives to bring transparency and shed the light on the VC industry's practices.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Injectopi – A set of tutorials about code injection for Windows - peperunas https://github.com/peperunas/injectopi ====== peperunas Hello guys! Let me know what do you think about these tutorials!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5 - c-oreills https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-makes-formal-objection-drm-html5 ====== josteink This DRM proposition definitely needs all the resistance it can get. We cannot allow DRM into our wonderful, open standards. This is not an option. Not at any price. I'm honestly surprised that Mozilla haven't been more vocal about this issue. Have they issued any statements what so ever? Seeing what amazing things the web have enabled the last few decades, purely by being open, who are we to deny the future the same possibilities by locking it all down now? What sort of short-sighted _asshole_ would propose such a thing? To those who yammer on about Netflix: Allow me to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin. He who gives up freedom for comfort deserves neither. If this goes through though, what I see others are calling out for is a new consortium. If the W3C is hellbent on forking and fragmenting the web, then lets have it. But let's have it on our terms: By creating a new open web standards consortium. ~~~ jiggy2011 "Open standards" are about documenting interfaces in such a way as that any person could develop a compatible implementation, nothing more. There is already a massive amount of proprietary tech running the web. From internet explorer to the secret algorithms used by google. Pretending that the web is some hippy utopia is not accurate. This proposal simply describes a standard protocol for a DRM system to be able to talk to a web browser. If you don't want to use it, simply choose a browser that ships with it disabled or disable it yourself. You're not going to lose access to your favorite sites because of this. The sites that would want to do this are already implementing paywalls or existing DRM systems. ~~~ josteink _There is already a massive amount of proprietary tech running the web. From internet explorer to the secret algorithms used by google. Pretending that the web is some hippy utopia is not accurate._ That's a bogus argument and misses the point completely. That you have closed source systems deployed on the open web is completely OK. That you have closed sourced browsers interpeting markeup is also completely OK. As long as the markup and code produced and published is compliant to the open standards we have all agreed upon. Because then anyone with the specification can interact with that content. That means that anyone, of any size, can sit down and implement a fully valid and compliant web-browser. This latest proposal from W3C means an end to that. Having the HTML specification will not be enough to create software able to render all the content on the web. Your browser will need to be "sanctioned" and "supported" by the DRM-vendors in order to work on the web. New platforms (FirefoxOS, Tizen, etc), new browsers, any new players at all and all open source endeavours are effectively shut out from this new web the W3C is drafting. That is unacceptable. This is a disastrous departure from any former W3C specification and directly in opposition to the W3C's own mission statement. We are only left to guess what sort of corruption has lead to W3C sinking this low. Whatever happened to allow this rot, a new consortium seems like a good way to solve it. ~~~ jiggy2011 Not at all, your browser does not need to be sanctioned. Anybody can build a browser that speaks HTTP and can send HTML pages around. There is no mandate that you integrate DRM to be standards compliant, it's perfectly valid to write a browser that simply says "no" to any requests to perform DRM functions. [https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted- med...](https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted- media/encrypted-media.html) You can simply implement a "clear key" system which does not require any CDM. ~~~ belorn That misses the point. While anybody can built partial web-browsers, they can't build competitive alternatives to those sanctioned by DRM-vendors. Just speaking HTTP and partially parsing HTML pages does not a web-browser make. ~~~ jiggy2011 Yes, you can. You are free to support whichever content protection systems you want to support. The only DRM mechanism which is part of the standard is clearkey which is DRM in the same way that SSL is DRM, i.e not at all. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791579> ~~~ josteink You mean you are free to implement a second class citizen on this new, closed down and Hollywood-driven web. Yeah. That sounds really sexy. That sounds like the pinnacle of achievements for open standards. ~~~ jiggy2011 Hollywood does not have jurisdiction over the majority of web. They cannot force you to use DRM. ~~~ vetinari They can lock you out, when you are not using DRM. ~~~ jiggy2011 They can only lock you out of their content (as they are already doing). They can't lock you out of HN for example. ~~~ vetinari This is problem for you, if you are browser creator: "your browser sucks, I cannot watch Hulu". ------ duncan_bayne I've made this point already on the W3C CEO's blog, but it bears repeating here: DRM removes control of certain aspects of a device that I own, and places it in the hands of another. It does so in a manner that could not be less trustworthy: most DRM solutions are proprietary, closed-source applications. This means that I can't rely on others to audit it for me (as with FOSS) and I can't audit it myself. Some DRM implementations in the past have been so aggressive in their usurpation of control that they have qualified as malware; the Sony rootkit is a particularly egregious example of this. DRM actively reduces the trustworthiness and security of all machines on which it is installed. It has to by design: its stated purpose is to restrict the capabilities of a general purpose computer. ~~~ alipang DRM allows you to volontarily give up whatever control of your machine you're talking about. As painful as it is, one part of living in a capitalist society is to exercise your right/power as a consumer. Don't like it? Don't use it. To me, DRM is not something that infringes on your freedom, though I'm very glad we have the EFF when they spend their time combatting things like surveillance, that are not opt-in. ~~~ duncan_bayne > As painful as it is, one part of living in a capitalist > society is to exercise your right/power as a consumer. > Don't like it? Don't use it. I agree, but there's more to it than that. From the W3C site: "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web." ... and ... "One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability." Therefore it's perfectly reasonable, in the context of a capitalist society, to lobby the W3C to refuse the addition of EME. It is inimical to their own stated goals (there are other conflicts too; see <http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission.html> for details). To be clear, I'm not arguing for the initiation of force. Companies should be free to build their own DRM systems, and others to use or not use them as they choose. But the W3C should have no part of that, and the HTML5 standard should not be crippled by the inclusion of DRM. Another angle to consider is our cultural heritage. More and more of that is moving to the Web; if we tie it up with DRM, bitrot will mean that in a generation or two most of it will be inaccessible. ~~~ alipang I don't see how DRM is incompatible with their goals. Of course one might argue that DRM might be platform specific. However, I very much doubt this standard will make DRM _more_ platform specific than it already is. ~~~ shawnz > However, I very much doubt this standard will make DRM more platform > specific than it already is. Of course not! In fact, due to the nature of the web, it will make DRM in general less platform-specific! The problem is that HTML will become more platform-specific. ~~~ smackmybishop How will this make the binary-only, proprietary DRM blobs less platform specific, exactly? ~~~ shawnz I suspect most DRM today exists for Windows only. Thanks to Android, there are now a ton of consumer devices powered by Linux that can browse the web. If publishers started using EME, they would probably be encouraged to compile Windows _and_ Linux blobs for this reason. ~~~ duncan_bayne I disagree. The CEO of the W3C thinks this unlikely, and there's already the example of Netflix. They are one of the primary agitators behind EME, and they refuse to make their system available on Linux. ~~~ wavefunction So you want to demand that Netflix provide at their expense a solution for every possible OS out there? Don't like it, don't partake. I can't understand this mentality... ~~~ duncan_bayne > So you want to demand that Netflix provide at their expense a solution for > every possible OS out there? > > Don't like it, don't partake. I can't understand this mentality... What mentality? Perhaps you should read my other posts. To summarise, my position is: \- if Netflix wants to build their own DRM system, fine \- if they don't want to include my chosen operating system, that's their perogative, they just lose out on my money \- what is _not_ okay is for Netflix to lobby the W3C to include DRM in HTML5 The point I'm trying to make is that having a DRM standard in HTML5 does not mean that Netflix will suddenly start to support Linux. Several posters have expressed this idea, and it's just plain incorrect. ~~~ wavefunction I guess I agree with you then, and thank you for clarifying. ------ johnvschmitt Good for EFF. DRM is futile. There is NO stopping people from recording what's on their screen (with a cell phone camera among other devices). What we've seen is: A) The more barriers you put in front of legitimate use, the more you see illegitimate use grow. B) The EFF is rock solid in standing up & protecting our rights & values in the modern, internet, connected age. Please help fund them. Meaning: DRM all you want. Make it so that you can ONLY see Game of Thrones if you pay $100,000!!! Great! And, imagine how long it'd take for a copy (lower fidelity, sure) to get in the hands of a larger audience that you can't control, who doesn't like you, who you collect no $ from. Or: Drop DRM, & go for "iTunes or Netflix" or other distribution methods that are EASY & fair. Watch your revenue boom, while you collect user stats to make your next content even more appealing & marketable. ~~~ benatkin No, what's futile is this objection by the EFF. But I think it's a token gesture, so it probably doesn't bother them that much. ~~~ Anonazon I've really been disillusioned by EFF lately. It seems like they're more of a black hole of activist's dollars than anything productive. When I donate, I like my dollars to go to more productive and practical use (like FSF) than to support libertarian ideals wrapped in a feel good presentation. ~~~ mwcampbell The FSF is opposing this proposed W3C standard too, of course. What's wrong with having the EFF oppose it too? ------ cynicalkane The market problem is that people want to consume _expensive_ art. There is billions of dollars of interest in making this market clear. The market will not go away because a bunch of hackers find it unethical. As the war on drugs has demonstrated, the market interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it. I see a lot of opposition to DRM _on principle_. These principles will go nowhere. The interesting question to me is whether DRM is part of an standard s.t. required permissions are visible and minimizable and the platform is open, opt-in and extensible... or whether it will take over your devices with God-knows-what secret solutions, which is the situation today. I think the W3C standard is problematic (having read it) but represents a small step in the direction that is less wrong. The third option, an imaginary free-information utopia, is directly against the economic will of the people in general. ~~~ bcoates The enthusiasm against DRM is mostly based on principle because the technological argument is so uninteresting. "DRM is part of an standard s.t. required permissions are visible and minimizable and the platform is open, opt-in and extensible" isn't possible and this is non-controversial among anyone not in the business of trying to sell it to someone who doesn't know that. ~~~ cynicalkane DRM is just a math problem (encryption) coupled with a hardware problem (retaining control of the results). The industry in, say, video games has settled on an equilibrium of making it very hard but not impossible to crack the hardware. But uncrackable encryption hardware already exists, it would just be inconvenient to make it uncrackable inside an XBox. But whether the _methods_ of DRM are open or closed is an implementation detail. Nobody thinks that TLS being open makes it crackable. But if users and programmers know the capabilities and requirements of DRM solutions, they can sequester them from the rest of the computer. ~~~ mwcampbell All of the crypto in the world is worthless for a DRM system if a user can easily circumvent the system by replacing one of the components between the black-box DRM module and the hardware in order to get a perfect digital copy of the "protected" stream. This is why "content protection" systems, like the one introduced in Windows Vista, tend to be so over-reaching; they want to create a leak-proof pipe between the "protected" media and our senses. ~~~ cynicalkane That's a last mile problem the industry doesn't need to solve. How many people would rather hack hardware than pay money to watch TV and play video games? Of course, if it becomes cost-effective to hardware encrypt the entire stream, I don't think the lack of a W3C standard will make any difference in stopping it. ~~~ bcoates > How many people would rather hack hardware than pay money to watch TV and > play video games? It only takes one. Everyone else just uses that cracked copy. I'm not worried about DRM working, I'm worried about it not working in a way that gets in my way as someone whose time is generally worth more than the hassle of finding movies on bittorrent. ~~~ nullc This has an expedient solution of only making devices which are able to play DRMed media (perhaps with permissive flags), and having all authoring tools use a per-user content creator key. Then the same broadcast encryption keying that allows players to be selectively disable also allows the cracked transcoder to be disabled. Of course, this isn't terribly compatible with general purpose computing but operating systems intended for the public have been moving away from general purpose computing for some time and tables and mobile devices are pretty close to that now. If we go far enough down that path the makers of these handicapped devices can even get legislative help in preventing competition from more user friendly devices by outlawing their sale as was the case for macrovision. ------ JonoW I hear lots of objection to DRM in HTML but no alternatives. If EME is rejected and not added to the HTML spec, lets consider some alternatives: 1\. Leave things as they are, so Flash and Silverlight limp along to serve DRMed content, and native apps are required to watch on devices which don't support plugins. Verdict: Not great, but hey it's how it is now. 2\. Lobby the media owners to drop DRM. Verdict: Highly improbable 3\. Lobby the media distributers (Netflix etc) to boycott media owners who won't drop DRM. Verdict: Highly improbable 4\. Ask end-users to boycott purchase of un-DRMed content (and no pirate it, as they will only encourage the media owners to use more DRM). Verdict: Highly improbable. Us nerds may do it, but regular folk don't really care about DRM. 5\. EME is implemented as a convention, but not in the official spec. Verdict: Possible, I think EME will be implemented in IE and Chrome with or without it being in the spec. Mozilla wouldn't I presume. Can anyone think of any others? ~~~ Daiz We leave things as they are. If content distributors refuse to play without DRM, let them stick to inconvenient existing plugins. The DRM-insisting gatekeepers will ultimately need the web more than the web needs them, so they'll have to concede _eventually_ , even if it takes a good while before it happens. ~~~ jiggy2011 Why do they need the web? If the only way to watch Game of Thrones is to install a standalone application then people will simply install the standalone application. ~~~ JonoW I think this is the crux of the issue - should the web be a general purpose platform? Or do we draw a line somewhere and say some tasks, like watching protected video isn't something it should be doing. Personally I think all video consumption is a good fit for the web, it's seem awkward to split protected and unprotected video. ------ chris_mahan when I first heard of DRM in HTML5, the first thing that came to mind was that web apps would be encrypted, and that the only interface people would have would be mouse or touch. This would essentially make the web like blue-ray: great for consuming content and playing scripted games, and not-so-great for everyone else. Also, how long before "safe" browsers only allowed drm- encrypted web apps, to "protect consumers"? I agree with the EFF that DRM should not be in HTML5. ~~~ ivanca That's the only natural evolution; for example the news sites will say: "Why the movie industry have protection but we don't? We need HTML5 DRM in our writings, is our copyright less important than theirs? I say no sir!" And slowly an internet where you can't use browser extensions, where you can't copy anything you read, where you depend on the existence of a company, a functional internet connection to play (just once) the content you bought, but a content that you certainly don't own. ~~~ taybenlor I feel like you're falling trap to the Slippery Slope fallacy ~~~ ivanca I wish I had your naivety; but I already sow things like a media center that counts heads and will stop the movie if the amount of people exceeds the number allowed by the purchased licence... [http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/139706-microsofts-new- kine...](http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/139706-microsofts-new-kinect- patent-goes-big-brother-will-spy-on-you-for-the-mpaa) ------ kunai The only true solution to the problem of DRM is to kill Hollywood. It's unlikely to happen, though. Many others have reiterated on this point, so I'm not going to waste my time iterating yet once more. <http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html> ~~~ zanny Economics will kill Hollywood if we resist their bribes to cripple open technology and they flounder into obscurity. They currently control most of the chess board (from ISPs to copyright to the law in general) but we hold the key pieces (that are becoming more essential over time as the Internet becomes more global and pervasive). ~~~ alipang I doubt killing Hollywood will be the solution. Industry will always try to gain unfair advantages through legislation as long as we let them. That is, as long as government is too large to really care about the little guy. Harmful legislation is much more present in large legislative agencies such as the US government or (to some extent) the EU. Decentralizing legislative authority to e.g. the states is the only way to get laws acted in your own best interest. ~~~ youngerdryas Having different laws in every state is exactly why most of the world can't watch Netflix. The EU is trying to consolidate things which gives incentives to negotiate contracts. The last thing the EU needs is more Balkanization as companies can't afford to comply with twenty different regulatory schemes. ~~~ zanny If the most powerful nation conglomerate in the world has to appease a corporation and negotiate, you are already off the deep end. The world can't get netflix because big studios want to release content where they want when they want, and instant data transmission over great distance impedes that if everyone can watch the latest show in their home country before they had 3 months to buy the box set in stores. ------ dendory When I try to view video content, being told that I am not wanted as a user is more common than not. If I go on Hulu, ABC, NBC, and even many YouTube videos, I am not that the maker of the video did not figure out a profitable enough ad model for my country so I should just go away. This country ban is so common because Flash players make it trivial to do so. If you extend the same to all types of web content, I fear this DRM will be used for far more than just some random Hollywood movies. ------ bcoates What's the Mozilla Foundation's position on this? Are they planning on staying involved in a post-DRM W3C? It's about time to for the anti-DRM pressure groups to go down this list: <http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List> And start demanding the member organizations to make a public statement as to exactly how far the EME DRM standardization is allowed to advance before they will withdraw from the W3C. ~~~ cmircea I am not sure of the official position, but I seriously doubt Mozilla will EVER implement this. They've been opposing H.264, which is a lesser evil (patents) than outright DRM. ~~~ blinker They stopped opposing H.264 once they needed it for Firefox OS. I'd expect Mozilla to support the W3C DRM stuff as soon as someone makes Netflix a requirement for their Firefox OS phone. Maybe it won't be Mozilla but someone shipping Firefox OS will do the work. Then Mozilla will feel pressure to take the patch they provide. They're in a difficult position now that they're in the mobile phone OS market. ~~~ tmzt Or the very real possibility that Netflix (etc.) won't even be on the Firefox OS platform without EME. Since Firefox OS builds on an Android userland there could be overlap in the hardware-mediated playback of protected content with Android devices based on the same SOC. To be clear, after reading the EME spec it's primary a vehicle for transmitting the state of third-party module to Javascript, that module being permitted access to the media element backing a video or audio tag and to perform the final rendering of the content to an output device. Those who are saying this spec precludes open implementations of a user agent (web browser) should probably read the spec. Some CDM vendors will restrict their plugin from working on open browsers, but there is no reason to do that as the CDM can be the unit processing the protected stream and rendering it. This means that open browsers can implement this spec and use CDMs that conform to an open ABI without compromising the protection of the content. The CDM if used this way will be responsible for rendering a video or audio stream, not a shared graphics context like Flash or Java, and overlay graphics and UI will be implemented in standard HTML not in the closed CDM module. ------ Fuxy I would never use a browser that implements DRM. As the EFF stated DRM is a back box with the intent of taking control from the user so why the hell should i allow it in my computer. If their content is so important to them they can keep it just stay the hell out of my browser. I value my privacy more then i covet their content. ------ VonGuard OK, I am gonna catch hell for this, but there is one major reason for having DRM in HTML 5. NetFlix. Streaming video sites are handcuffed to the media owners. Those media owners(Viacom, Time Warner, etc.) REQUIRE DRM in any contract with a streaming video provider. NetFlix uses Silverlight for this reason. Without DRM, NetFlix can never move to HTML5 and VP9. It's sad, but true. The W3C is not just being a buncha dicks. They're listening to all sides. Who cares if there's DRM in the spec, anyway? It doesn't mean people have to use it. And we all know it'll be cracked in a matter of SECONDS upon formal implementation. ~~~ jlgreco Who cares if Netflix needs it? If Netflix wants to do DRM in the browser, then they can continue to do it the painful way with traditional proprietary plugins. Why should we oblige them and dirty the standard in the process? ~~~ VonGuard Because not doing so concedes this type of market to Microsoft. Open standards are a way to ensure no specific company has control over stuff like this. ~~~ jlgreco > _Because not doing so concedes this type of market to Microsoft._ Bullshit. 1) I am able to gleefully avoid it these days, but in the past flash worked with Linux. Furthermore, all relevant DRM systems work with Apple devices including OSX. Netflix works on Android, and on Google's ChromeOS. 2) Even if it did, who gives a shit? I'd rather have people who _absolutely must_ watch netflix on their laptop do it with windows than have the standard dirtied with this shit. 3) _Nothing about this shit being added to the standard will make Netflix work on Linux with open-source browsers anyway._ You are high if you think this will allow you to use Netflix on your GNU/Linux box. Netflix already has their shit working with google-chrome, on a Linux kernel, in ChromeOS (Linux, but not "GNUy", for lack of better terminology). They don't allow that to work with regular GNU/Linux because they don't trust the rest of the stack to keep their precious bits secret. ~~~ quaint- Netflix actually already "works" in Linux, or at least did back when I last looked it up, and most probably their CDM would as well. I'm of course speaking of using wine. (Having not actually tested the solution, I cannot verify it nor tell about its shortcomings.) Or perhaps they would rely on secure/trusted path this time. I doubt that - the hardware simply isn't there for their customers. Anyhow, I certainly wouldn't want W3C to endorse any type of DRM, or have them make it easier to abuse DRM. It's a _good_ thing that Flash and Silverlight are restricted to PCs. It's a _good_ thing that plugins annoy people; it makes them less desirable. We really shouldn't be building a new framework for plugins on all platforms. Furthermore, I'd like to assure everyone reading this that DRM-free media is (still) thriving on the Internet. It's unfortunate that some people fail to play along; this only means that money doesn't go to the right people even if it's their media that's being exchanged. ~~~ lucian1900 Netflix only sort of maybe works with Wine + Firefox. If you're lucky. ------ bitwize The Web is going to get DRM one way or another. Now we can do this the easy way, with standards that are agreed upon across vendors -- or the hard way, with proprietary plug-ins that only work in Windows and Internet Explorer. ~~~ lambda The Web has DRM, implemented in proprietary plugins: Flash (and to a lesser degree, Silverlight). And this proposal involves DRM implemented with proprietary plugins (known as CDMs). There is no requirement that CDMs be available across platforms, on open operating systems, available to license by any vendor. The CDMs are the new proprietary plugins, they just happen to do less than Flash, leaving more of it up to the browser. Is it really so much better to trade one proprietary form of DRM for another? What does that actually get us? More crappy services, where Hollywood decides on a month by month basis which particular services get to offer its content, so you need to sign up for 5 different services just to watch all of the content that you watch? And each one of them supports different set-top boxes, doesn't work on open platforms, and restricts you from backing up media that you have bought? This isn't improvement; this is just wanting to get browser vendors to implement anti-features that users object to, instead of getting Adobe to do it. ~~~ Drakim The worst part is that Flash and Java aren't going to go away anytime soon either. You basically have to have both, and the web will be a lot harder to navigate on anything but a Windows machine. ------ ollysb What exactly is DRM supposed to achieve? For it to work it seems to need to prevent 100% of all opportunities, worldwide, of duplicating copyrighted material. A single copy is all it takes to seed every single pirated copy. I can't see that the sales of DVDs and Blu-rays are going to dry up any time soon and given how easy it is to copy those how does DRM help at all? ~~~ tacticus It allows you to restrict what products OEMs are allowed to make and sell forcing them to license shit from you. ------ shmerl The objection is good, but how exactly is the final decision made by W3C? By majority of participants or some other way? ------ nileshtrivedi This is sort of like Linux kernel supporting a fixed ABI for binary modules. There are those who say that it's a good thing and benefits are more than the costs. And then there are those who say that this would be bad and it prevents us from going through a temporary struggle that would eventually lead to a better solution for the long-term. I tend to favor the second camp. Let's not compromise on our vision for the open web. We have gone through a lot and have achieved a lot. A short-term hassle is acceptable for the long-term win. Edit: This is also similar to the classic paradox of tolerance: Should we tolerate the intolerant? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance> ------ holloway An argument in favour of the W3C policy is that DRM video plugins could be retired but what about all those sites that attempt to prevent right- click\|save-as on photos, or on JavaScript, and why wouldn't they use DRM too? The EME draft doesn't just handle video, does it? ~~~ josteink _The EME draft doesn't just handle video, does it?_ For now it does. But if we let it pass, you better believe that slippery slope we've went into is going to get a whole lot steeper. The open web only has one option: Fighting DRM entirely and fundamentally. We don't need Netflix on the web, and definitely not at the cost of our fabulous, open standards' core values. ------ ancarda Mozilla eventually decided to support H.264 in the <video> tag. Is there any indication they will/will not support HTML 5 DRM? ~~~ blinker Not supporting it would be bad for Firefox OS. It would mean that platform is locked out from streaming video solutions (ie. Netflix). This would discourage carriers from supporting Firefox OS. On desktop it doesn't matter so much. They have a marketshare to make a difference when they take a stand. However now that they're in the phone market, if no carrier will take Firefox OS due to the streaming video issue then the OS is dead before it really begins. ~~~ josteink I think you generalize the absurd US cellular carrier situation on to the world. Most places in the world you have carriers which provides phone services, accessible by a SIM-card, and you have phones, which accepts SIM cards. These are two entirely separate things which you choose entirely at your own bidding. You chose the carrier which provides you with a service matching your needs at a price you are willing to pay. And you use the SIM card they provide in the phone you have chosen entirely separate. In a world like this a carrier doesn't "support" a phone. That would be like my ISP having to "support" my Dell PC, or me having to buy a PC from a limited selection offered by my ISP. It's an absurd position. Most of the world does not work like the completely and fundamentally broken US cellphone market, and generalizing based on that is doomed to reap highly inaccurate results. ~~~ blinker I may be generalizing incorrectly but given Mozilla's lack of comment either for or against the W3C DRM initiative I think they're not wanting to jeopardize partner arrangements by saying anything negative. Even if they have no deals requiring DRM, why turn off potential partners with statements that don't need to be made yet. Usually they're publicly all over this sort of thing. I don't see any Mozilla people commenting in this thread about what they think either which is unusual but probably wise. On the other hand I don't see statements from Opera either and they're usually pretty anti this sort of thing. Maybe they're both doing behind the scenes work to scuttle the DRM initiative and don't want to make it public yet. ------ byuu For anyone else having problems loading the page, try Google's cached version here : [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff- makes-formal-objection-drm-html5&strip=1) ------ crististm Twenty years ago, at the rise of Internet, DRM would have been unconceivable. How come we're here now? ------ mythz This objection, does a solution not help make. ~~~ mikeash Sure it does. "Don't" is a perfectly reasonable solution here. It won't satisfy all parties, but not all parties are worth satisfying. ~~~ mythz The future of everyone being able to view online video (e.g. Netflix/Hulu/BBC) without a plugin is not getting anywhere closer. ~~~ mikeash Sure looks like it's getting closer to me. The amount of content I can view without a plugin has absolutely exploded over the past few years. Sure, big Hollywood names aren't in there yet, but it's not like they're the only ones who make videos worth watching. ~~~ mythz What you mean by "big Hollywood" the mainstream population refers to as "TV" and "Movies". None of which we're able to watch without a plugin. I do all my TV watching online (95% on Netflix/Hulu), even most of the videos I watch on YouTube require flash, despite being opt-in to using the HTML5 video player. ~~~ mikeash Your statement was "closer". Even if the video watchable without plugins is only 1% of the total, your statement is still wrong if it was e.g. 0.1% a few years ago. Regarding YouTube, I do most of my YouTubing on iOS devices, and it's _very_ rare to find a video that doesn't work, so the non-plugin support is good. Why it doesn't work in your browser, I couldn't say, but at this point I suspect it's more about your setup than YouTube not supporting it at all. ------ roopeshv Here's a radical idea: If you don't want DRM on your website, don't put DRM on your website. They are not making anyone use DRM against their will. ~~~ kunai That's extremely narrow-minded. First of all, the DRM is proprietary. Those using open-source browsers like Firefox or Chromium _won't_ be able to view any sites that push DRM at their will; especially if it's integrated INTO the web standard itself. It doesn't only affect web developers, it affects _users_ , and the fact that you can't see that is astonishing. I don't know whether to be appalled or amazed, to be honest. Normally, when DRM is implemented, it has been done so through plugins and other proprietary solutions, but the core technologies in the web -- HTML, CSS, and JavaScript -- have been _open_ , and they should stay open. Implementing proprietary DRM in an open standard is a slap in the face for Mozilla and Google, who want an open Web. And everyone else wants an open Web too, not just the big organizations. And third, let's just face it -- DRM fucking sucks. ~~~ mwcampbell Actually, Google isn't as innocent as you might think. They acquired a DRM company called Widevine, and the Widevine DRM system is now integrated with recent Google Chrome dev builds. ~~~ acqq Maybe that's why is Google Chrome installer more complicated than some rootkits. ------ walid The way I see it is if DRM is going to be managed in Firefox and Chrome then it wouldn't necessarily block a determined person from circumventing it. Both browsers are open source. HTML5 DRM will only stop people from using regular copy/paste. I have a feeling that the EFF is over-reacting, but only time will tell what the right action should have been. ~~~ fafner That's why the W3C proposal is a proposal for an API which proprietary plug- ins would use. The plug-in will do the decoding and rendering. Therefore the EFF is absolutely not over-reacting. [https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted- med...](https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted- media/encrypted-media.html) ~~~ walid I'm sorry but you're overlooking that this is already the case with Flash. Our other alternative to Flash is to use a native app. Both ways are not web friendly in that they both completely rely on closed standards. This is one of my gripes with Flash. It is a lock-in tool that is controlled by one company, namely Adobe, who isn't interested in my security and gives me a player for free to collect money from publishers. Native platforms, aka apps, on the other hand create a lock-in that completely ignores the browser. This draft however helps create a common standard, albeit closed, but standardized in operation which means there will be competition on other many fronts: better encryption extensions, secure, respecting privacy, all of which don't describe Flash or even QuickTime or whatever pops to mind. To point out the irony of labeling DRM as the ultimate evil: Do you use iOS/Android/Windows Phone/BlackBerry 10/Kindle?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Immature email addresses and job interviews - sauravt ====== sauravt As claimed by this guy, <http://9gag.com/gag/a8LrMpV> , does immature email addresses matter while hiring candidates ?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Extreme Cleverness: Functional Data Structures in Scala - puredanger http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Functional-Data-Structures-in-Scala ====== michaelcampbell I saw this talk (or one based on it) by Dan at Clojure/conj this year. It's a bit over my experience, but he's an extremely engaging speaker, and knows his material well. Very much worth the time to watch.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Metabase, an open source business analytics startup, closes $8M Series A by NEA - tlrobinson https://www.businessinsider.com/metabase-an-open-source-business-analytics-startup-closes-8-million-2019-4 ====== cammsaul Excited to see this. I love Metabase and use it every day.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Recovering Emotions After 24 Years on Antidepressants - BobbyVsTheDevil https://www.madinamerica.com/2018/10/recovering-emotions-24-years-antidepressants/ ====== psergeant The only thing that seems to be universally true about mental health is that we’re all different, and someone else’s experiences rarely apply perfectly to your own. I put off getting on the meds for at least 15 years longer than I should have done because of stories like this. They have been life changing lot positive for me with almost no downsides. In addition, I’ve read more than one story like this where the person eventually decides it’s time to get back on the SSRIs after a year or two off. Experiment, find what works for you, but these articles that are angry at big pharma and describe pills as primarily bad need to be seen very much as just localised experiences. ~~~ ssorina I am also a bit skeptical when strong anti-Pharma opinions are expressed, based on personal experience only. Meta-analyses have shown that for severe depression, antidepressants are a first line of attack, only seconded or aided by CBT, but not interchangeable in terms of efficacy. It's kind of stupid to counterargue with yet another personal story, but for me not being able to take SSRIs has proven to be a real problem. I developed a somewhat rare side- effect with both SSRIs and SNRIs, I basically covered up in unexplanable bruises and given the increased risk of internal bleeding, am cut off from this medicine class completely. The only time in my life where I was not crippled by anxiety was on these meds. I continually try relaxation, CBT, DBT and whatnot, but unfortunately I am one of those who does not respond as well to therapy as I do to medication. To be really honest, I am on the other side of the fence: I hope big pharma comes up with something else than benzos and SSRIs for anxiety, so that I can be relieved from the task of living my life spiting anxiety 70% of the day. ~~~ throwaway895237 > I hope big pharma comes up with something else than benzos and SSRIs for > anxiety, so that I can be relieved from the task of living my life spiting > anxiety 70% of the day. Have you tried psilocybin mushrooms or DMT? I'd been on meds for years treating depression and anxiety. A few mushroom and DMT experiences have basically cured my depression and anxiety and opened up a whole new way of looking at things. ~~~ Fnoord Yeah, I have used psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, and MDMA (and marihuana as well) before I went to seek professional help (or, rather, after I was disappointed with a previous professional endeavour and discredited the psych scientific community as a whole). After that, I tried the psychiatrist route (got a prescription) and eventually tried chronic gaming and alcoholism. _None_ of that helped. Until I once more went via the professional route, and they found out I have ASD. Now I have SSRIs to cut off the sharp edges related to being oversensitive. The great thing about the SSRI I use is verified content (I'm sensitive to drugs..), its standardised (I'm still sensitive to drugs) and it has a high half-life (again, I am very sensitive to drugs and if I forget to take a dose in the morning I will notice it in the afternoon even with a half-life of a few days). With the stuff you're suggesting though, you either don't know what you get, you don't know how strong it is, or you're otherwise experimenting. An accurate diagnosis was all it took. Its hindsight 20/20 but I wish I never went with the routes which _didn 't_ work. I recommend to follow conventional science first, and only if that is fully exhausted follow the path of unconventional science (full with pseudoscience, charlatans, illegal drugs, and what have you -- btw I used psilocybin and DMT when they were legal in my country, and the amount of marihuana and MDMA was well within the decriminalised amount). TL;DR my advice, follow the scientific route, get professional help, get second opinions. If its costing you your savings even though you don't get immediate effect _I have been there as well_. I know that sucks, but it'll get you further than the dark route I sketched above. With regards to those drugs parent mentioned lets wait till there's scientific consensus on these. ~~~ pmoriarty It's sometimes not enough to simply use psychedelics. A lot has to do with the way you use them, with what intention, in what context, with whom, and how you follow up on and integrate your experience. Plenty (most?) people take psychedelics without any kind of therapeutic or constructive intention -- they take them to party, to escape, as an antidote for boredom, etc. It's not surprising that such use of these powerful substances could have undesirable or even very negative effects -- though sometimes even such arguably reckless use still produces positive results. Use of psychedelics in therapeutic and healing contexts tends to be very different. The intention tends to be very different, with a focus on healing or on a specific illness, symptom, or problem that the individual suffers from. There is often serious preparation for the journey, ranging from ways of purifying oneself (for psychedelic use in shamanic or other sacred contexts), to sessions of therapy (when this has been done in Western medical contexts). The actual trips themselves also tend to be handled quite differently in healing/therapeutic contexts from recreational ones. In recreational contexts, people often do it at parties, with the lights on, or maybe watching movies, or maybe sometimes outside in nature. In therapeutic/healing context, the lights tend to be very low or off, sometimes blindfolds are used, and the focus internal. Music is often carefully selected to guide the journey. Sometimes people are asked to look at photos of loved one they've brought with them for this purpose. If things go wrong, trained support is available, and instructions are given on how to the experience in a constructive way, while in recreational settings the support is minimal and usually untrained, if it exists at all. After the experience, the recreational user is usually on their own in terms of integrating and making sense of the experience, while in medical contexts there are often followup therapy sessions with trained professionals who can help in making sense of and constructively using whatever was uncovered during the trip, and perhaps the scheduling of further experiences with modified dosage, if needed. I have no idea how your own psychedelic experiences were, but if they were more of the recreational kind, I am not very surprised that you didn't get much out of them. ~~~ Fnoord The problem wasn't that I didn't get much out of them (I got a whole lot out of these experiences else I would've quit after doing it once) the problem is that it didn't gave me the ASD diagnosis or the long-term benefits of stable SSRI usage together with education and work. If I knew back then that I had ASD, I'd have benefited from that knowledge back then. In the meantime, I was stuck with the notion that I have a (different) diagnosis but I cannot work out how to apply that with my real-life. Sure, the circumstances were different as well, and it is anecdotal. The usage of drugs (recreational or not) without them being prescribed and without a trained, licensed professional guiding you is indeed something different than recreational usage for which the drugs I mentioned (psilocybin, MDMA, marihuana, DMT) and A.muscaria are not licensed for anywhere AFAIK. The recreational drug usage of psilocybin was, for me, almost exclusively done in a safe, private setting though without bright light and with a careful choice of music. Because otherwise it hurts. For DMT and A.muscaria, it was exclusively done in such setting as well. I can guarantee you my focus was inward however it cannot be compared to a licensed, educated babysitter who's getting paid. ------ pasabagi YMMV, but for me, anti-depressants allow me to have emootions. When I'm off them, emotions are way too intense, so I clamp them all down until they're barely there. After two years of anti-depressants, I'm finally able to listen to music I really like, read books I find emotionally affective. ~~~ Fnoord For me, Prozac (SSRI) cuts off those sharp edges. But when I started using it I could barely walk with it (e.g. taking stairs gave me intense muscle fatigue, nausea, and I was very tired in general), so strong it was (eventually this initial effect faded away). I have an ASD diagnosis. ~~~ pasabagi When I started on venlafaxin, I used to fall out of chairs. I think part of what gives anti-depressants such a bad rap is they have a god-awful beginning and end. I still go around evangelising them, because I just can't bear to imagine all the people who get put off by the (horrible) start and horror stories, and live in purgatory for years with no light at the end of the tunnel. Because, as far as I can see, side-effects usually just mean the dosage is wrong, or the drug-combo is wrong. ~~~ towndrunk I’m working my way off Venlafaxine after years of use. It’s been a horrible experience. Brain zaps. Hearing odd noises. Crazy emotions. Feeling sick etc. I backed up and started opening the capsules so I can count the number of beads I take each day and then try to reduce by a few beads each week. It’s been really tough to get off this stuff. ~~~ throwaway-efxr Weaning off Venlaflaxine was absolute hell until I started taking Prozac as a bridge. It still wasn’t great, but it was a fraction of its previous awfulness. Took me about nine months to wean off venlaflaxine, started the Prozac bridge in the middle and grateful that I eventually used the bridge. Feeling better now. Good luck to you. ~~~ komali2 I went through the above journey as well and for me it was not worth it. Psychotherapy combined with meditation was a far better treatment and thus why I am hostile to any suggestions of medication from my psych. I simply don't trust the drugs, at all, anymore. ~~~ Fnoord Meditation/mindfulness is a proven method to alleviate the symptoms of depression and anxiety such as a lack of focus. I use it regularly, and can recommend it however psychotherapy with or without drugs would be my primary recommendation. It is going to take effort, either way. There's no magic stick which can be waved to fix the issues at hand. ------ braindongle Those of us in the field of psychiatric research encounter innumerable illness narratives of this sort. Everyone has their own story to tell about what went wrong and what helps. While these anecdotes may be of value to the storyteller, they are at best worthless if you are serious about understanding your options in mental health. Evidence-based psychiatry is messy, but good people are working hard to build credible evidence, and not just for pills. "Everything is biased by pharma money" is often said by people on the sidelines. Psychiatric services researchers know better. Interested in meditation vs medication for depression? Start with a systematic review in a reputable journal, like this: [https://goo.gl/yN1asm](https://goo.gl/yN1asm) ------ justin_ht_dang These type of personal anecdote fuelled by a general distrust of 'big pharma' can be very misleading and discourage patients from seeking professional help. I also want to point out that the author of that book she speaks highly of also happened to be the Presiden of the publication[1]. I think not mentioning this fact make the article even less credible. [1] [https://www.madinamerica.com/staff- page/](https://www.madinamerica.com/staff-page/) ------ odiroot I'm a bit worried how many people on social media and Internet in general (also here) are fighting some personal war against antidepressants. This is not helping and may cause a lot of suffering to some people. We're in some wacky second generation New Age where everything illogical is the the obvious solution, just for the sake of breaking with the old. There's really many people for whom literally no amount of talking, meditation or working out (Internet's favourites) will help. Yes, for them, before they can even start thinking about successful therapy (etc.), the chemical imbalance is so strong they need to bring their bodies to the baseline (or close to it). Again, militantly opposing SSRIs creates very dangerous situation where people in need can end up getting hurt or dead. ~~~ AnIdiotOnTheNet As someone who spent a good amount of time on an SSRI, I get where they're coming from. The people who prescribed them to me seemed to think I was fine, and saw no reason I should try to get off them despite personality changes and what I would term "an inability to experience". It was as though I was only able to observe my own life from the outside. The problem with SSRIs isn't that they can't be useful, it's that the medical industry is full of people who don't seem to know how to use them. They just wanted to throw a pill at the problem and get me out of their office as fast as they could to extract maximum profit out of my visits. ~~~ hndamien Unfortunately, unless the Dr prescribing them has taken them, it is very hard to appreciate exactly what they are doing to you. There are very subtle effects that are very important to being a happy human that these drugs remove. The data supporting their effectiveness over the absence of them is dubious as well. That isn't to say they don't work, just that over large enough cohorts, the wins and the losses seem to cancel out. ------ dhubris From past experience, about four months after I've tapered off anti- depressants I'll want to die. It'll take about a year to recover once I'm back on them. But that's me. What works for me may not work for you. Unfortunately, a lot of it is trail and error, along with a lot of hard work, to figure out what is the best treatment for each individual. It sucks that this is the case. At I wrote once upon a time[1]: "There is no silver bullet. Pragmatism trumps opinion. If, and I stress, if what you are doing is working for you, then I wish you good fortune, and would never tell you you're doing it the wrong way." [1] [https://dhubris.livejournal.com/14447.html](https://dhubris.livejournal.com/14447.html) ------ DubiousPusher I appreciate this person sharing their story. If you are struggling with mental illness please be cautious before following this person's example. Her circumstances may be very different from your own. If you want to consider a simillar course please talk to your healthcare professionals and the people in your support network first. For every story of someone successfully discontinuing psychoactive there is one that ends in disaster. ------ Spearchucker American use of antidepressants comes up at dinner conversation every so often. Stats are readily available, but what's less apparent is why it's so widespread in the US. Does anyone have any ideas why this is? ~~~ projektfu I'm taking a wild guess based on your domain name that you're in the UK. It appears to be about 11% in the US, 7% in the UK. So, 63% more in the US, but still a reasonably small fraction of the population. Or, if 11% is sizable, so is 7%. [https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-largest- antidepres...](https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-largest- antidepressant-drug-users-2016-2) The question is how many suffer depression without medication, and how many remain on antidepressants after recovering, as an insurance policy. Is there less suffering in Korea? Or more stigma against using antidepressant drugs? ~~~ tk75x 11% of ~325 million vs 7% of ~65 million = ~31 million more people using antidepressants in the US than the UK. Also I'd hardly say >10% is reasonably small, but that's a judgement call. ------ tw1010 How do you recover emotions without ever having been on antidepressants? ~~~ psergeant [https://www.thecut.com/2016/04/what-it-s-like-to-wake-up- fro...](https://www.thecut.com/2016/04/what-it-s-like-to-wake-up-from- autism.html) ~~~ PavlikPaja Autistic people were never thought to lack emotions, in fact many complain about feeling too intense emotions. The article is garbage. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2518049/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2518049/) [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2010.0022...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2010.00224/full) ~~~ gowld Read the article, not the parent poster's mischaracterization of it. The very first paragraph explains the autism+emotion issue. Also your own sources contradict the claim "Autistic people were never thought to lack emotions". ~~~ PavlikPaja >Also your own sources contradict the claim "Autistic people were never thought to lack emotions". Where? ------ mnm1 It took me about a year to get to the point the author describes where I felt nothing and didn't care whether I lived or died. I wasn't suicidal--at last I don't think I was--but I was rapidly approaching that point. I was so desperate, I let the doctor put me on benzodiazepines for anxiety even though I knew from previous experience that I would not only become dependent but addicted. After seven years of that, I had enough and stopped seeing all doctors. I weaned myself off the benzos as no doctor I saw even knew how to do it nor did they want to. It wasn't as hard as I thought. After I was off that, the hard part started. Over the course of years I learned how to deal with life again. Eventually I took up running, my own meditation equivalent and soccer. Slowly things improved. It's not always great and many of the original problems are still there but they are mostly manageable. I'm lucky to be alive really. I try to remember all this suffering at the hands of doctors and the pharma industry that could have been avoided. I will have trust a so called mental health professional again, especially if they are drug pushers. The conflict of interest was readily apparent throughout the whole ordeal both when taking antidepressants and benzodiazepines. It's funny how we demonize some drug dealers while having insurance coverage for others. And all this without a single shred of proof that these medicines work, that there is even such a thing as a chemical imbalance. Because there isn't. If this is what mental health doctors call facts, the entire establishment has failed and derailed into nothing more than making humongous profits from getting people addicted to the drugs they push. It's fucking disgusting. ~~~ simen I sympathize with you, I really do. I've had some similar experiences. But you're overstating the case. Numerous meta-analyses have found that antidepressants do work for people with severe depression, much better than placebo. Unfortunately there's many people for whom they don't work, and even when they work you may have to try many different kinds to find the right one(s). The state of depression treatment is sadly not very good right now, everyone knows this. But it's just not true that there's not "a single shred of proof that these medicines work". Depression treatment doesn't depend on "chemical imbalance" as an explanation either. Research on _whether_ antidepressants work proceeds alongside research on _why_ they work, if they do--usually studies on the efficacy of drugs are completely independent of mechanism. They study clinical outcomes, not neurochemical or larger structural brain issues. So even if we had no idea why antidepressants (potentially) work, we could still know that they do work based on clinical outcomes. And it's not exactly true that we have no clue at all. The past 20 or so years the monoamine hypothesis hasn't been the main avenue of research into the neurobiology of depression. These days, it's at best considered one possible factor, not the defining and only factor. There's a lot of research into the structural changes that follow depression and recovery. For instance it's now known that serotonin helps regulate the expression of BDNF, which in turn regulates the growth and repair of brain cells and synapses. So it may well be that serotonin triggers large-scale "repairs" in the brain in areas related to emotional processing, such as the amygdala. Here you can see that the focus isn't so much on individual levels of "chemicals" in the brain as on the structure of the brain and how different natural and exogenous factors affect that. ~~~ gcb0 just because it works better than placebo doesn't make it the best treatment. all over the world, terapies works better than antidepressants, with infinitely less undesirable side effects for patient and society. yet in the US it is very common to treat depression (and many other conditions) with drugs alone. arguments against drugs is not favor of "don't do anything". that argument would be extremely dumb. just to give some perspective on how badly interpreted the data is in your argument: brain-splitting surgery, which is still used for epilepsy, also shows a cure for several other conditions, yet nowadays you would be a criminal for even suggesting it for things it was widely used 20 years ago. ~~~ simen As far as I'm aware therapy and antidepressants are equally effective, in the studies that have actually compared them such as this one: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3683266/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3683266/) However that is only true in aggregate and obviously not necessarily true of any given individual. I'm really reluctant to get into any further discussion though because it seems like you're arguing against things I never said, and bringing up irrelevant, but extremely invasive and side-effect prone procedures like hemispherectomy as if that proves that data about antidepressants is bunk, which is just a complete non sequitur. It would be like bringing up bloodletting or lobotomy as if that proves that the data about modern vaccines NOT causing autism is bunk. Just a complete logical disconnect. ------ Random_Person I've been tapering off of my antidepressant for 3 weeks now after 4 years. The sudden flood of emotions has been weird, but familiar. I can't imagine going decades without. ------ Nasrudith From my experience SSRIs are like the prince searching for Cinderella with the glass slippers in reverse - trying tons of them to find the one that finally works. I have had all sorts of fun side effects until I got a combination that was stable - the first one worked fine except for causing unsolicited panic attacks, some had lesser side effects but worse depression, another left me irritable and shifting strongly on political spectrum ironically. The combination I'm on now wound up having the reverse with sexual side effects - it improved things over not taking any medication. I find it is completely the opposite for emotions with anti-depressants. They don't suppress them but allow me to feel a wider range than just null, fear, anger, and despair. There also are some therapeutic components as well and they aren't a panacea. For one I have become more outspoken as I find repressing my emotions is a depression trigger. ------ patrickg_zill How did people deal with mental illness before these drugs were around? I recall that melancholia was a real diagnosis a long time ago. My personal view is that in some cases physical exercise can be helpful. I have family that are on Wellbutrin etc., and others that studiously avoid any drugs. ~~~ Nasrudith The same way they dealt with infections before antibiotics - unhealthy self- medication and at times dying. ------ Vaslo I take a very small amount of Nortriptyline for horrible IBS. It has changed my life. In addition, while the small dose does make me a little more tired, my anxiety has improved and the debilitating effects of IBS have all but vanished. These pills are like any treatment, they can open the gate to Heaven, or if poorly managed, can open the gate to Hell. ------ dennisgorelik > I was taking 500 mg of Nefazadone in the evening \--- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nefazodone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nefazodone) Nefazodone is available as 50 mg, 100 mg, 150 mg, 200 mg, and 250 mg tablets for oral ingestion. \--- Why would she take such a big dosage of antidepressants? Could she try to reduce the dosage? ------ ocdtrekkie I was forced into antidepressants by my parents when I was younger, and after coming off of them, I realized I hadn't enjoyed things like music for years while I was on them. Definitely something that had a negative impact on my teen years and it took me years to recover. But I recognize that for others it can be crucially necessary. ------ jccalhoun Who is this person? I searched her name and didn't find anything that indicated that she is someone to listen to about mental health. ------ interfixus > _The causes of my depression were environmental. I grew up in a very > dysfunctional family in Minnesota. My parents were both alcoholics and > depressed, and their dysfunction became my growth environment_ This may be the case, and there may be corroborative evidence for such a conclusion that we are not told about. But as presented, it's just a set of circumstances, presumably correlated. If both parents suffered depression, author might reasonably be supposed to have a strong genetic predisposition. ------ choot I am using Withania Somnifera to cure my depression. I've not experienced the loss of emotions using it. ------ flaniganswake Thank you for sharing this. ------ op00to This article is absolute bullshit and quite frankly dangerous. It seems to me this woman was emotionally vulnerable and taken in by a snake oil huckster masquerading as a doctor. > Shortly after I started seeing him, my new doctor had me read the book > Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. Robert Whitaker's theses in that book have repeatedly been scientifically disproven. It's anti-science drivel. > The pharmaceutical industry also says that mental illness represents a > physical problem with the brain that needs to be fixed. There are no studies > that prove that this is true. This statement is untrue. Literally three seconds of googling showed me this: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4471964/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4471964/) Which basically says that when we deplete the body of certain neurotransmitters, people get depressed. That sounds like a pretty clear statement that there are biological processes at play in mental illness. ~~~ baumgarn I think you're stepping into a fallacy here. Of course every thought process is bound to biological processes in the brain. So we can see this as some sort of biochemical mapping of our understanding and perception of the world, and our social status in it. Why should the solution to a negative outlook be to mess with the chemistry alone, through drugs? You can just as well ask the other way around, what kind of world and experience is leading to such a detrimental biochemical mapping. The woman in the article describes this herself, she was called fat and ugly by her father throughout childhood. This has to do with social status, not brain chemistry. I find it quite frankly disturbing that the solution to such a learned insecurity should be just drugs. ~~~ thomasfedb > Why should the solution to a negative outlook be to mess with the chemistry > alone, through drugs? Well perhaps because it works? > We identified 28 552 citations and of these included 522 trials comprising > 116 477 participants. In terms of efficacy, all antidepressants were more > effective than placebo, with ORs ranging between 2·13 (95% credible interval > [CrI] 1·89–2·41) for amitriptyline and 1·37 (1·16–1·63) for reboxetine. Source: [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736$17$32802-7/fulltext) Of course there's issues with publication bias, but this is the best evidence we have to work with. Psychotherapy ("talking") also works, and so the teaching I've received tells me to prescribe both in tandem, although the drugs "alone" do help. I'm a student doctor. > I find it quite frankly disturbing that the solution to such a learned > insecurity should be just drugs. I think your implicit suggestion here is that the correct treatment is unlearning. I suggest that this is not always possible. The plausible mechanism is that damage during development might result in "built in" changes that can't be talked away. ~~~ Alex3917 > all antidepressants were more effective than placebo Comparing them to placebo isn't appropriate, you need to compare them with an active placebo and only look at studies that continue longer than two years. Of which there are all of like 2 studies. ~~~ thomasfedb You should remember that we do research on real humans. Sometime this means we can't have the evidence we'd like to have. Active placebos are designed to cause detriment to the patient - to cause side effects to convince them they're not on the placebo. Getting ethics approval to do randomised trials in depressed patients is hard enough without harming your control group. ~~~ Alex3917 > Active placebos are designed to cause detriment to the patient Patients on active placebos have reduced depression symptoms as compared with patients on non-active placebos. ------ zahllos I have had an anxiety problem for a long while now and like the author have recently stopped taking medication for it. I've developed enough techniques from a combination of therapies like mindfulness and CBT and have enough support in place to check this is working that my doctor agrees with this approach. Additionally, I felt the problems caused by the side effects of my medication outweighed the benefits gained by taking it. Finally, I realized that for me exercise simply isn't optional. I have at times in my life been extremely fit and these times have always corresponded to the periods I've handled my anxiety best. I find the article somewhat troubling in that the author seems to imply that antidepressants are a big pharma conspiracy and are difficult to stop. I personally have had side effects - insomnia, sexual dysfunction, the "fog" the author mentions, although I wouldn't describe it as zombie-like. There are other possible side effects as well, like inducing the liver to release enzymes into the blood stream that imitate fatty liver/liver failure in blood tests, significant weight gain etc. However, I have not had all of these on all tablets - on some, yes, on others, nothing at all. Regarding stopping, the worst case was venlafaxine. I've heard people describe the experience as "brain zaps". It feels a little bit like an electric shock in the brain and is fairly unpleasant (this is with tapering down properly under medical supervision). However, on no antidepressant have I ever felt the need to take the tablet, or to take more of it than the prescribed dose and I have never felt taking a lower dose while stopping to be problematic - it does not resemble fighting addiction at all (I've known people who were addicts and for some of them their addiction killed them, so I have some basis to make this comparison). Ultimately however, taking antidepressants is a trade off between how bad the side effects are (and I stress that in some cases there were none) and the benefit from the tablet (in some cases, none as well) versus the impact the problem (depression/anxiety/...) is having on your day to day life. In my case and I suspect in the author's case as well, at the time I started taking the tablets the benefits outweighed the side effects and allowed me to be a somewhat functioning member of society. By taking antidepressants I was able access other treatments such as CBT and benefit a little from them, as well as hold down a job. Also, it has to be said that when I first started having problems with my disorder I didn't have anywhere near the same emotional maturity or understanding of myself as I do today. I feel that this understanding has a significant effect on my ability to use things like mindfulness and CBT alone, without any other help - I am benefiting far more from it now. I also wonder if the author would have been so successful with meditation if they had used this and only this technique 24 years ago. I suspect in many cases finding what works takes time and is a process that can't really be avoided. I'm uncomfortable because the author is implying it can be and moreover that antidepressants should always be avoided. I disagree. I'm glad the author found something that helps and I'd also recommend mindfulness, but I feel that sometimes people need help and antidepressants are one option and that people shouldn't discount them based on articles like this - instead they should have a thorough conversation with a medical professional (if necessary, more than one) about their options. ------ brian_herman :( depression is not fun ------ JustThrowMeAway After almost 25 years of taking antidepressants, I had no emotion left whatsoever. I felt dead and wanted to be dead. I wonder how to understand this. If you have no emotions, can you still want something? Why would you want to die? I tend to understand this sentence in a way that means she was suffering. But isn't suffering the same as experiencing negative emotions? Or is this supposed to mean that she had no _good_ emotions left, only painful ones? ~~~ eugman Think of a sine wave, with the y-axis representing the positivity/negitivity. A representation of life's ups and downs. I think what she was saying when she said "no emotion left" is that the amplitude of that wave was nearly zero. The wave didn't go up or down much. When she said, "I want to be dead", she's saying that the the average value is down in the negatives.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Is it just me or is the IT field becoming discriminatory? - agent00shoe Recently, I've been getting a lot of rejections, for job positions I know I'm qualified for, and it's beginning to make me look for a pattern and question things. I assumed having nearly 15 years of experience writing enterprise-level software, my experience would be desirable as I get more years under my belt. I'm looking for remote work so interviews are usually over the phone, and have a casual tone. When I mention that I have a wife and kids, I don't know if that's good or bad in the company's eyes. Do they only want younger devs, without other obligations, who can work 60+ hrs/week? Do they think I'm too old? I recently read this about the hiring process at Automattic: https://cate.blog/2019/05/15/addressing-hiring-gaps-through-user-research/<p><i>"To that end, as we reviewed our hiring process, we realized that the demographics of people we attract to apply are not inline with the demographics of the people we hope to hire. Whilst we have implemented a strong focus on metrics, and made certain adjustments, we’ve not seen the improvements we want. If this was a product, we would go to our users and ask them – so why not do the same here?<p>... we’re looking for women and non-binary people (trans/cis/gnc) who may experience similar gender discrimination in the workplace, who have multiple years of experience in a software development role."</i><p>So, they have a lot of straight, white male developers and their product goals aren't being met, so it might be because of the skin color and sexual orientation of their employees? I was a little surprised that Automattic would be so open and proud of their discriminatory hiring practices.<p>Am I being too sensitive? Is the discrimination real? Or maybe it's always been this way and I didn't notice when I was younger and landing the good jobs. Sorry if this post sounds like rant, but I've been a big fan of Hacker News for a long time and enjoy reading the threads because I genuinely value everyone's input here. ====== itamarst You seem to be approaching this from the wrong direction. If you're really suffering from age discrimination, instead of thinking of women and minorities as the reason you're not being hired (do you really think that's the case when there are so few in tech comparatively?!), you should be thinking of them as people who are plausibly in same situation as you: suffering from a form of discrimination. So: (A) you should be feeling solidarity with people who have hard time getting hired, not getting upset companies are trying to be more fair in their hiring practices by encouraging broader range of people to apply. (B) when you encounter companies that encourage women/minorities/etc. to apply, those are probably companies that are trying to hire people on merit, rather than preconceived notions. So those are exactly the places you _want_ to apply! ------ mastry To be fair to Automattic, that last quoted line is actually referring to a research project - not their hiring practices... > For our initial research, we’re looking for women and non-binary > people....... But I understand your frustration. I have 20 years experience and I'm currently looking for a job (considering a recent offer, actually). Age discrimination is real IMO but there's little you can do about it (very hard to prove). Move on, find an employer with more realistic hiring practices. You don't want to work for the discriminatory companies anyway. ~~~ repolfx But the research project exists to inform future changes in their hiring practices. It's quite likely Automattic already tries to discriminate in hiring because they mention their "strong focus on metrics" along with their amusing puzzlement that merely demanding more women and trans people be hired didn't automatically make it so. They certainly want discriminatory outcomes. That said I agree with what you write. I'm not sure explicit age discrimination is common though. It may appear to be happening but is often other things, nobody is actually deciding they don't want older people. Age discrimination against young people, that's common (e.g. young people not being allowed to be CEOs, like Larry Page). Not necessarily bad but common. Gender discrimination against men I've seen a bunch of times, and it's explicit. People say "we won't hire men". ------ Finnucane Encouraging more applications from women and trans programmers doesn't mean they're turning you down because you are not those things. If they do succeed at widening their pool of applicants, that may mean more competition overall for jobs. Was it to your advantage when the applicant pool was perhaps more limited in some ways? Maybe. ~~~ agent00shoe _" we realized that the demographics of people we attract to apply are not inline with the demographics of the people we hope to hire"_ This is the part that bothers me. They have a predetermined image of who they want to hire, based on nonfunctional qualities, like race and gender. If a company said they had too many minorities working for them and the demographic they really wanted to hire was straight, white males, it seems like people would be up in arms over that. But the inverse seems acceptable. ~~~ Finnucane Maybe, but the historical reality is that in many technical fields, women and minorities have been underrepresented due to deliberately exclusionary policies. There's not really a need to say, hey we want straight white dudes to apply, there's no shortage of such applicants. ~~~ AnimalMuppet _Deliberately_ exclusionary policies? I've been around a long time. I've _never_ known of a policy, at any place I worked, that discriminated based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. Disclaimers: I've never been the hiring manager, so I've never read the actual policies. And there may have been discrimination that was not encoded in policies. But I have never, to my knowledge, been anywhere that had a deliberately exclusionary policy. ------ CyberFonic I feel your pain. I have come up against ageism with the typical brush-off being "over qualified". I assume that the jobs you are applying for are for "remote" roles. If they are expecting on-site workers then suggesting that you are only willing to do the work remote is likely to be a non-starter. I fail to understand why you mention having a wife and kids. That is the sort of personal question that in must jurisdictions is no permissible. So why do you even volunteer that information? As for young devs, working 60+ hours for low salaries -- yes, that is a very common expectation. HNers can only share their experiences. The only real way to get answers is to actually ask the interviewers for feedback and ideally more information up front. E.g. ask how, where and when the work needs to be done; what hours are expected; what salaries range they are considering, etc. You could also tweak your CV to appear younger, more independent, less experienced, willing to do on-site work and see what aspects give you better results. Unfortunately, remote work is not always a viable option for many potential employers, especially in the enterprise area. ~~~ agent00shoe Thanks for the suggestions. I normally wouldn't talk about my personal life, but I currently have a good job and when they ask why I'm looking for a new/remote role, I tell the truth: my wife and I want to move to a small town in a remote area to be closer to family and there aren't any IT opportunities there. ~~~ prometheus76 Still-truthful possible answers that say the same thing without raising flags: "Cost of living where I am as increased quite rapidly, so I'm looking to relocate to a more affordable area." "I'd like to live closer to family, and my current work situation makes that impossible." "I'd like to move back to my hometown, but there aren't a lot of on-site opportunities there, so I'm hoping to get a remote position so that I can move back." You get the idea. You can be vague and still truthful, so that you stay under the radar. On a side note, it's very odd that having a wife and kids is something you now have to consider "hiding". Interesting times. ~~~ oldandtired Fifteen or so years ago, it was recommended that I remove two items from my CV, my age and my marital status. It was suggested to me that both of those items would, in quite a few circumstances, put me on the automatic reject list, irrespective of what I had achieved in the past. ------ freehunter >When I mention that I have a wife and kids, I don't know if that's good or bad in the company's eyes. You have two options: either don't mention the wife and kids and take the chance of getting a job that doesn't respect what you want from your work/life balance because they didn't know, or mention you have a wife/kids and not get hired for a job you would have hated anyway. I don't want to speak on your behalf, but I would rather get passed over for a job that was a bad fit than take a job that's going to have a negative impact on my family life. ------ seattle_spring Why are you mentioning wife and kids? Why would that ever come up in a professional interview? Also, what does remote IT work mean? Are you using IT as it's used in the midwest to encapsulate software? On the west coast, IT typically refers to networking and helpdesk type stuff. I don't see how it's even possible to do that fully remote. EDIT: Also, I recommend treating the blog you linked the same as Infowars. The owner is an Alex Jones-level conspiracy theorist, and her blog reflects that. She doesn't even try to hide her obvious contempt for men. ------ thiago_fm I think many jobs what they want is somebody cheap and that will take any orders. Experience or age isn't factored in. Those jobs you will want to avoid in any case. ------ HelloNurse Do you mean job positions you _think_ you are qualified for? You need to convince the employer that you are likely to perform well. ------ gshdg Are you serious?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: A Mobile OCR App That Does Circuit Analysis & Solves Math Equations - davidsmith8900 Good Morning & Happy Monday Everyone,<p>How do you feel about an idea like that? ====== mattlutze Did you mean this just as a discussion? I'm not seeing an article link... ~~~ davidsmith8900 \- Oh sorry about that Matt. I meant it as a discussion.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
F# Versus Microsoft's Regex. A Lesson in Types - DanielBMarkham http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/07/f-versus-micros.php ====== fleitz F# is one of the hidden jewels of the .NET platform, I really hope they give it first class support like C# and VB.NET. ------ jrockway Wow, F#'s backwards function composition is confusing! ~~~ fleitz I didn't see the function composition operator in there, I saw a lot of use of the pipe operator (\|>), F# does have backwards function composition but it is the << operator. Function composition is >>. You can also define new operators or redefine operators in F#. The annoying upshot of this is that bitwise operations in F# use three character operators &&&, \|\|\|, ^^^, <<<, >>> which is weird coming from an imperative background. They use this feature for dynamic invocation on the DLR (.NET 4.0), so to invoke foo() dynamically on bar you'd write bar?foo instead of bar.foo Speaking of regexes and operators, if you're a fan of perl or ruby you can do the following: let (=~) text pattern = Regex.IsMatch(text,pattern) or for maximum F# goodness let (=~) text pattern = Regex.Matches(text,pattern) \|> (fun matches -> match matches.Length with 0 -> None \| _ -> Some(matches))	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Price of Modern Life Is Depression and Loneliness? - Red_Tarsius https://medium.com/festival-of-dangerous-ideas/the-price-of-modern-life-is-depression-and-loneliness-96a2367f3460 ====== pinkyand He quotes 2 scientific research papers as claiming ‘spending large amounts of time online for social purposes may increase social distress and have negative impact on self-esteem.’ or similar stuff. But look at the details, the first article is about correlation, not causation. [http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/21685655](http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/21685655) Stopped reading after that. ------ ducuboy It's ridiculous how this statement gets so popular online. This "Look Up" video has 46M views [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7dLU6fk9QY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7dLU6fk9QY). Whatever post on this subject gets viral [https://twitter.com/ducu/status/464018491738431488](https://twitter.com/ducu/status/464018491738431488) "The modern technology (read 'facebook') keeps us from interacting face to face, so it makes us lonely and depressed. It was so much better _back in my day_ when we were playing ball, we were bumping into each other on the streets, and we were definitely much happier." \- Such a load of crap. These lonely people liking and sharing such nonsense are obviously online, and they are probably keeping in touch only with their school mates, or work colleagues at most. Imagine how lonely they must have felt if they could only interact offline, with just a small fraction of their current facebook friends, based solely on _geography_. Because that was the main criteria for human connection before the internet. When instead we should get in touch with the people sharing our interests, regardless of where they are located on the map. That is one thing we can only do online, and this kind of human connections would give a sense of meaning in our lives.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Exchange Alert – Track exchange rates via email or Slack - shawnps http://exchange-alert-978.appspot.com/ ====== shawnps Please excuse the ugly App Engine URL. If people end up showing interest in the app I'll put more time and effort into cosmetic stuff. I built this because I live abroad and didn't realize until too late that the exchange rate back to USD had gotten really high. Any feedback is welcome.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
[german] scientists cure HIV - anonyfox https://mopo24.de/nachrichten/sensation-dresdner-forschern-gelingt-hiv-heilung-49946 ====== jlg23 Summary for those who do not read German or are allergic to tabloids: * worked in lab cultures * worked on humanized mice * they have not done any clinical trials yet Here is the English press release by one of the two research institutes that conducted the research: [http://www.hpi-hamburg.de/en/current- topics/press/singleview...](http://www.hpi-hamburg.de/en/current- topics/press/singleview/archive/2016/februar/article/rekombinase- brec1-richtungsweisend-fuer-zukuenftige-hiv-therapie/) ------ brudgers Abstract of Paper at _Nature_ : [http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.346...](http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.3467.html) ------ brerlapn Ars Technica also covered the story: [http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/new-molecular- scissor...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/new-molecular-scissors-cut- out-lingering-hiv-maybe-once-and-for-all/) ------ creshal No source except a local yellow press newspaper? Yeah, riiiight. Nothing about it in other German newspapers. ~~~ jlg23 Give them some time... here is the first one written by and for people with at least basic medical knowledge: [http://www.apotheke- adhoc.de/nachrichten/pharmazie/nachricht...](http://www.apotheke- adhoc.de/nachrichten/pharmazie/nachricht-detail- pharmazie/infektionskrankheiten-rekombinase-heilt-hiv/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How wars, plagues, and urban disease propelled Europe’s rise to riches - bd http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3823 ====== jacquesm This article almost reads like a synopsis of 'guns, germs and steel' by Jared Diamond. ------ bayareaguy While the article claims to explain the emergence of a income gap by the presence of war and disease, I believe it only shows how easily arguments based on simplistic economic theories can confuse correlation with causation. ------ kingkongrevenge This only explains why Europeans had a relatively higher standard of living over the centuries. It does not offer an explanation for why Europe shot ahead of the rest of the world spectacularly in the 19th century. That question is addressed in A Farewell to Alms. It will never get much popular air time because the conclusion is basically eugenic forces. The most economically productive people had the most children in Europe, and this was not true in the rest of the world. ~~~ foldr See here for a critical review of the book: [http://www.firstthings.com/print/article/2007/09/001-economi...](http://www.firstthings.com/print/article/2007/09/001-economics- as-eugenics-41?keepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=500&width=700)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
An understated job advertisement - ChristianMarks https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/9887522?trk=job_nov&_mSplash=1 ====== pallandt Soo...lots of responsibilities and a warning to probably not expect an adjusted salary to match them ('Annual Salary: Negotiable, but you should know up front we’re not a terribly money-motivated group'), with these 2 as a minimum: \- A BA/BS or greater degree in Computer Science or a related field \- A minimum of 3 years in development and project management, preferably in a professional workplace In Seattle no less, with the expectation that you'll be on call 24/7 should they need you to fix something. I don't live in the U.S, but I have a hard time seeing how a truly qualified professional with a minimum of 3 years of experience in all the domains they mentioned would sign up for such a job if they really cared about their career progression, even if it is for Penny Arcade. This type of position sounds like it was almost intentionally designed for a high turnover of employees. ~~~ mcguire " _preferably in a professional workplace_ " But see... "\- You should have no problems working in a creative and potentially offensive environment. _ ------ asgard1024 This reminds me of: Wanted--Acrobat capable of crossing a slack wire 200 feet above raging furnace. Twice nightly, three times on Saturday. 53 Salary offered &sterling;25 (or $70 U.S.) per week. No pension and no compensation in the event of injury. Apply in person at Wildcat Circus between the hours of 9 A.M. and 10 A.M. See [http://diki.heliohost.org/parkinsonselection.htm](http://diki.heliohost.org/parkinsonselection.htm) ~~~ scrumper Thanks for sharing that, a fun read. ------ 7Figures2Commas > PLEASE FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER AT @RKHOO FOR UPDATES IN CASE EMAIL GETS SENT TO > SPAM FOLDERS, ETC. ____ If you do not have a Twitter, please note that you can tune in to KCTS 9 public television at 11:35 pm every evening through December 20 for broadcast updates about the position. ------ gesman >> Annual Salary: Negotiable, but you should know up front we’re not a terribly money-motivated group. We’re more likely to spend less money on salary and invest that on making your day-to-day life at work better. So I go to the local food store and tell cashier and store manager that instead of paying for their products with money, instead, "I could make their life better!" Will it work? If yes, then I'll apply. ~~~ Guvante Salaries are always a range. If you are in the range and they provide good benefits it can work out. ------ emillon This was covered on PBD: [http://programmersbeingdicks.tumblr.com/post/68153753288/pen...](http://programmersbeingdicks.tumblr.com/post/68153753288/penny- arcade-yep-theyre-still-terrible) ------ sethish I came to make a snarky comment about the job requiring you to be ok with working with Mike Krahulik, who I consider despicable. But their job posting does the job for me: > We’re terrible at work-life balance. Although work is pretty much your life, > we do our absolute best to make sure that work is as awesome as possible so > you at least enjoy each and every day here. *Edit: Originally reversed the author's pen names. Now using real name. ~~~ pgl Why do you consider "Tycho" despicable? ~~~ sethish Are you actually asking me why I consider Mike Krahulik despicable? If you are not aware of the issues surrounding him, I am happy to link you to some of the better articles. If you are aware of the controversy and are baiting me, I am not interested. ~~~ derefr _Jerry_ is "Tycho", the writer. _Mike_ (the one the issues surround) is "Gabe", the artist. ------ coldcode Rule #1, never work for a company with Penny in the name. ------ codeonfire Is this a joke? Serious question. I was looking for the part where they go a little too far and spoil the joke, but it never happened. ------ stygiansonic They may not get a lot of applicants, but at least they are being honest with the job description. ~~~ dccoolgai It's Penny Arcade. Even with the stern warnings laced into the advert, they'll get too many applications to sort through. They are the literal purveyors of geek cred....this is the geek version of "Devil Wears Prada". If I lived in Seattle, I might even think about applying. ~~~ stygiansonic Can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but I think the "geek cred" thing would wear thin pretty fast after having no work-life balance and being paid below- market for what your abilities are. ~~~ ath0 People are motivated by different things. "Below market" only matters if you judge yourself by how much you're paid compared to your peers. "Having no work-life balance" assumes that your "life" doesn't benefit from "work" in ways other than the size of your paycheck. If you already have a house/apartment you like and will still be able to afford with this job, find the work you're doing interesting, have the appreciation of your co-workers and the freedom to do your work the way you want (because no one else who works there is an IT person); if you find playing video games with colleagues a reasonable facsimile of "life"; if being a visible member of a team that has a youtube channel with 10s of thousands of subscribers who look up to them is more important than owning a bigger TV; then this job may be worthwhile for you. And why is it a problem that someone would rather have those things than a salary at market rates, or an ability to go home at 5pm and spend time with their family not thinking about work? ------ happywolf That is a lot to ask for, and my first thought is: what happens to the company if the person holding this position leaves? Dividing this job into two positions will sound more reasonable. ~~~ philbarr They're certainly setting themselves up for letting someone get their feet under the table, have everything set up so that they're indispensable, and then turning round and saying, "So, NOW let's talk about that salary." Which is probably exactly what anyone with the kind of brains and experience they're asking for is going to do. ------ EGreg Translation: not enough money to hire four peopls. ------ leke I would love have an example of how they use a chunk of your salary on making your day-to-day life at work better... > We’re more likely to spend less money on salary and invest that on making > your day-to-day life at work better. ------ artumi-richard It looks like they want someone clever, but they won't be getting clever people with expectations like that. Unless desperate. ~~~ polymatter or a liar ------ russfrank This sounds awful. ~~~ Xdes After I finished reading that the only thing I could think is the next guy is gonna burn out fast. ------ deleted_account This thread is full of 9-5 crybabies. I've interviewed at so many places where all these requirements are implied, but never spelled out. At least PA isn't coy about who they want to hire. ~~~ tptacek I think I'm going to stick "9-5 Crybabies" in the "who we're looking for" section of my next job ad. Thanks! ~~~ deleted_account Be sure to add in "Bed-wetters need not apply" or else you'll be sifting through a mountain of resumes. ~~~ deleted_account HN has no sense of humor.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: A global database of mental associations to spark ideas - rafaeljimenez http://seenapse.it ====== RickS While the idea seems cool, as far as the home page is concerned, I found the colors jarring, the illustrations unsettling (especially that first one), and the text mostly empty of meaning. There are 4 paragraphs spread out over something like 1600 vertical pixels. When I saw that the video was not only in that same "clown on acid" visual style, but 2:45 long, I bailed hard. Pairing mental associations seems like the kind of thing that should be demo'd on the home page, not buried behind a signup wall. In other words, you need to provide value upfront. By upfront, I mean within the first 500 pixels of page height. edit: I'm not affiliated with these guys, but they showed up on HN recently and I found their site compelling. [http://www.timeful.com/](http://www.timeful.com/) ~~~ rafaeljimenez Thank you, good point. ------ fiatjaf Awesome thing. I really liked the idea when I read it. But when I looked at, it wasn't so great. I don't know what is missing or what is wrong, maybe the ideas I saw weren't mine. Or maybe the transition between "anything you think about" and the paper is not that easy. ~~~ groundhog I agree--I am very impressed by your splash page (both design and copy) but I feel like it wasn't consistent with what you get once you sign up. For me, I was expecting something similar to Brian Eno's "Oblique Strategies" from the description (i.e. more vague, abstract suggestions), but it turned out to be more like Random Wikipedia. ~~~ rafaeljimenez Thanks for your comment. Did you search for something specific? Your comment on randomness totally applies to the home page, but not to the connections, we think. Fun fact: Brian Eno played with an early prototype of Seenapse and gave us some feedback too :) ~~~ groundhog I didn't--I just went with the default recommendations based on my designated interests. I just tried searching for "dating websites" and it returned: Modern reliquaries & New Commodore 64, Sexy beast & Ben Kingsley, Pretty Mouth And Green My Eyes & Raymond Carver While I do like Raymond Carver, I'm not sure if I find these connections intuitive...do you suggest search terms that are more abstract? Also out of curiosity, what did Brian Eno say? :) ~~~ rafaeljimenez No, concrete searches should work, and will work better once more people contribute their mental associations. Since this is fairly new, there aren't many yet. But it should become more useful over time. Eno said "So, does this exist? Is this live? Yeah, I'd like to use it." He also shared an interesting idea/need which I mention here: [https://medium.com/@rafael_j/the-cultural- ouroboros-e7917388...](https://medium.com/@rafael_j/the-cultural- ouroboros-e79173882fda) Thanks again, R	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Should I Bake? - federicoponzi https://shouldibake.com/ ====== andybrace There's a really good primer article to give some context here: [https://theconversation.com/renewable-energy-supply-and- dema...](https://theconversation.com/renewable-energy-supply-and-demand- during-lockdown-and-the-best-time-to-bake-bread-141345) and we've also created the following for a better bake! \- a twitter forecast ([https://twitter.com/baking4cast](https://twitter.com/baking4cast)) \- an Alexa Skill ([https://www.amazon.co.uk/Baking-Forecast-Bake-renewable- powe...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Baking-Forecast-Bake-renewable- power/dp/B08944JQQ2)) ------ yunusabd Neat idea, any reason why you focus specifically on baking as the main activity? Found this [1] while looking for numbers for Germany. It's showing different values for the percentage of renewable energy use in GB, 38% vs 26% on your site. Any idea why? [1] [https://www.electricitymap.org](https://www.electricitymap.org) ~~~ andybrace Hey! Good question RE why baking, because this does apply to any energy intensive activities (possibly an iteration for the future). ....so, 1) we've started with baking as we believe its the most accessible way to contextualise what is a challenging topic to explain (especially for those outside of the academic world) 2) the wider the audience we're able to engage, we hope, the greater the impact. Baking is a ubiquitous activity that (almost all?) households do regularly, and it can be scheduled around the forecast with fairly low impact to the user's time 3) cause baking is also pretty popular right now ;) But the same logic applies to other activities, it's better to use the dishwasher, wash your clothes, charge your (car) batteries when there's more renewable energy being generated. RE the discrepancy between the figures, we're only including 'hydro', 'wind' and 'solar' in our calculations, whereas the Electricity Map includes Biomass (which can be a controversial inclusion due to the associated land use and biodiversity impacts). Also, a lot of this is based on forecasting models (which rely on many factors incl historic weather data, forecasted weather, consumption etc etc), so... you could say it's similar in some ways to predicting the weather. We use the GB's National Grid Carbon Intensity statistics ([https://carbonintensity.org.uk/](https://carbonintensity.org.uk/)) for our data so that we're most closely aligned geographically. ~~~ yunusabd Thanks for the insights! I agree that baking is a good gateway. I think it would be even more persuasive if you could come up with some calculations, to show how much CO2 can be saved individually and collectively by following the recommendations. ~~~ andybrace yep definitely, quantifying the impact of changing the time you bake would be a great next step (.....we've got quite a lot on our list).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
My experience learning IPFS and publishing my personal website - Jpoliachik https://youtu.be/N4RKKHSyZlk ====== Jpoliachik I've been meaning to update my personal website for a while - and learning IPFS gave me a great excuse to get started! I had a great time learning IPFS basics and getting something published. I'm a total n00b with this stuff - but the IPFS learning resources were great. I wrote a blog post too: [http://justinpoliachik.com/posts/2020-03_ipfs_website/](http://justinpoliachik.com/posts/2020-03_ipfs_website/) Working on a Part 2 where I talk about building the blog and publishing via GitHub Actions. Feedback welcome! Let me know if I missed any technical details... ~~~ capableweb You don't seem to actually talk about where the data is stored. Someone on IPFS has to pin your content, who is doing that? Or you're running your own node + gateway to serve the content? (I only read the blogpost, not a fan of video content, so maybe you answered it in the video) ~~~ Jpoliachik I could run my own node, but I opted to use pinata.cloud instead. ~~~ capableweb Ok, so in the end, what are you really using IPFS for here? You might as well gone with Netlify and ask people to do `wget --mirror` and you would have built exactly the same thing, albeit not on experimental technology, am I right?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Apple Patent Reveals Pseudo-Holographic Display - rmah http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/12/27/apple-patent-reveals-%E2%80%98pseudo-holographic%E2%80%99-display/ ====== abyssknight Sounds like the eye tracking we saw using the Wii-mote awhile back, just using front-side cameras. Heck, you could do that now with a simple app and some eye tracking. ~~~ beej71 I had a snarky reply about how anything could be patented, but this invention is actually different than the (extremely cool) Wiimote thing we saw earlier.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Simple social skills that will make you more likable - lorax http://www.businessinsider.com/social-skills-that-make-you-likable-2015-11-3 ====== woodandsteel The article includes active listening. That means giving the other person your full attention, and saying back to them their key thoughts and emotions. I just want to add that if there was one thing that I could do that I think would make the world a better place, it would be to teach everyone active listening. Just to give one example, I have done several workshops where I paired up people on opposite sides on political issues, and just had them active listen to each other. It was simply amazing how much more civil and productive it made the discussion.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain - buserror https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-google-is-patenting-work-he-put-in-the-public-domain/ ====== dxhdr Reading through the linked 2014 email exchange is somewhat amusing. I love how the first two responses to his ideas are uninformed cynicism regarding increased hardware memory costs. Then things start to make a bit more sense with another engineer interested in coders actually digging in and verifying / debugging his work. And then of course it takes a dark turn at the end with Google applying to patent his ideas which he so generously offered to them. ~~~ Promarged It reminds me of one person here on HN describing their interaction with Google w.r.t. their startup's novel idea. ------ hamami I think it would be useful if there was a patent type for "free for anyone to use", something like the MIT License in open source. This would make it easier for patent officers to discover and reject applications conflicting with prior free to use patents and offload the burden of keeping track of this from the inventor to the patent office. ~~~ maxk42 Well it used to be that no action was necessary to prevent someone from patenting something you've already invented and released publicly: The first person to invent it had the right to patent or not patent it, and nobody else. A few years ago we switched to a "first-to-file" system and this is a direct consequence of that. Someone who didn't invent something can now file a patent. Doing so is a lengthy, expensive process, so the immediate consequence is there is no more "public domain" inventing. This needs to be reversed. ~~~ paulddraper I'm not saying the system is perfect, but there is a reason we switched to the current system. If I've invented widgets (or think that I've invented widgets), I should be able to know if I can patent and sell them, without years later getting sued because someone once did it in their basement and left it at that. ~~~ Natanael_L First to invent doesn't automatically mean they can sue when you file your own patent and intend to sell - they have to file their own patent first, and if you've already published enough of the invention before they even filed, then that only means _neither side_ gets a patent (original inventor because they can't wait until after publication to file, second inventor because they were late). Also, first to file has the same problem you mention. You can invent something, never publish, and get sued by somebody who reinvented it later. ------ djsumdog I wish more of the world would take New Zealand's stance. Software patents are banned in that country. The US/EU should really go a similar route. ~~~ dd36 It’s probably too late. Too many entrenched interests and public interest groups don’t have resources. ~~~ tabtab It will probably only change if non-software-patent countries start kicking our economic butts. THEN policy makers will take notice. ------ mikece What is the relative advantage of putting something into the public domain versus releasing under an Apache 2 or MIT license? The latter doesn’t restrict anyone’s use AND establishes a public record to refute what Google is trying to do. Additionally, communications by email could be via GitHub issues and open to all to see. ~~~ ajb enedil is correct. To expand on that: MIT and Apache2 grant a licence to copyrightable expression. But the literal code is not what is patented, the idea is. Granting a license to the code doesn't automatically prevent someone else from patenting the idea. MIT doesn't say anything about patents. Apache2 additionally grants a licence to any patents which the author has which cover the work, and also tries to prevent someone using the work and then suing other people for patent infringement. But it does so by saying " any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed." Which is a null threat in this case, as the idea is to try to prevent there being a patent in the first place. You could argue that the author should have patented the idea, and then freely licensed it. But since patents cost thousands each, that's a bit much to ask. ~~~ mcbits That sounds backwards if I'm reading you right. An idea can't be patented (well... in theory), but a new invention based on an idea can. Google apparently thinks they've got a new, non-obvious invention based on Duda's public domain work, which may itself have been patentable but wasn't. That's one reason why companies rich enough to spam the patent office tend to do so. Company A invents X. If they don't patent it, then Company B can invent X+1, a minor improvement on X, and patent X+1 themselves. Now Invention X can't compete with X+1, so Company A invents X+2, an improvement on X+1, but now they have to pay license fees to Company B even though they invented the original thing! Solution: just try to patent every stupid thing. ~~~ tacon No, the way to protect yourself is to disclose anything you don't want to patent, but don't want patented against yourself. IBM had a great system for several decades[0]: [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Technical_Disclosure_Bulle...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Technical_Disclosure_Bulletin) ~~~ mcbits That establishes prior art for X, but X+2 would still potentially infringe on X+1 and they'd have no leverage for negotiating a license. Except they're still one of the biggest patent spammers, so they probably do have leverage in the portfolio somewhere. ------ kyle-rb This reminds me of the "pull to refresh" patent that Twitter owns, but has promised to only use defensively. Optimistically, Google wants a similar thing so they can defend the use of this technique if someone tries to seek royalties for use of this video encoding technique. A little less optimistically, Google wants it so they can pull the license from a specific party if that party tries to sue them for an unrelated patent. ~~~ ndr What do you mean by defensively then Isn't patent war a bit like Risk in that whoever has more patents (no matter how related) used by the other party wins? ~~~ jaredklewis More like MUD. The cost of litigating a patent war between companies at the scale of Google is so high, that it’s generally not in anyone’s interest. ~~~ QuercusMax I think you mean MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction. Although a patent-war MUD (multi-user dungeon/domain) might be an interesting premise. ~~~ jaredklewis Oh, yes, definitely meant that, thanks! ------ xfs Read this reaction from xiphmont: [https://xiphmont.dreamwidth.org/84214.html](https://xiphmont.dreamwidth.org/84214.html) It paints a quite different picture. ~~~ allenz This comes off as rather dismissive. Xiphmont simultaneously claims that Jarek's work is useless ("the performance claims just don't hold up") and that Google needs a defensive patent on it. As someone on encode.ru pointed out, "if Google genuinely wanted this as a defensive patent, then the right approach is to work with Jarek and pay for him to file a patent on ANS itself blocking as many of the spin-off patents as possible." They didn't even talk to him before patenting his work. ~~~ kevmo314 That doesn't sound like the right approach. Google has the resources to actually defend the patent. While ideally/ethically Jarek should be the one with the patent, if the patent is only being used defensively, Jarek probably isn't the right entity to actually defend it. ~~~ allenz Google could also buy the patent from Jarek. At minimum, they should have talked with him. ------ tehabe Another example why software patents don't really work. Because most thing software patents cover are not really inventions but ideas. Also the written code is already protected via copyright. That is the difference to a eg. wind mill, the blue prints are only protected by a patent, not by copyright. And it effects only the implementation. ~~~ monochromatic What’s the difference between an invention and an idea? ~~~ pbhjpbhj An invention is the implementation of an idea, it can in theory be made. An idea can't be made. A faster than light drive is an idea. A detailed description of a working physical device that can propel a vehicle faster than light; with sufficient detail that experts can make the device from the description is a potentially patentable invention. ------ DannyBee "a view largely endorsed by a preliminary ruling in February by European patent authorities" If one clicks through, you discover it says literally nothing of the sort, it just says they will include that email exchange as a possible prior art reference (along with a lot of other things). It actually doesn't express any opinions at all, except on the priority claim, which is not related to this part. It is literally a notification that says "we will consider these two additional things as possible prior art references" This part is very shoddy reporting. ~~~ allenz I think you missed the other seven pages. Page 2 paragraph 6: > The present application does not meet the criteria of Article 33(1) PCT, > because the subject-matter of claim 1 does not involve an inventive step in > the sense of Article 33(3) PCT. ~~~ DannyBee The PDF it gives you on mobile is indeed one page. But reading all the other pages it still doesn't change my view. The part you cite is about whether that claim is patentable at all in view of the paper, it's unrelated to the prior art emails. If that is upheld it would mean the person complaining here could not get a patent either. They've made no determination that what is in the emails is relevant to anything that I can see. It would also be par for the course since examination tends to take a while. ~~~ allenz > it's unrelated to the prior art... they've made no determination that what > is in the emails is relevant to anything that I can see Paragraph 6.1: "The author of D1 [Jarek] provided in January 2014 in an on- line discussion forum information that would allow a skilled person to reach the invention without having to apply any inventive skills." Paragraph 6.2: "In particular, it has been proposed in the on-line discussion forum to use ANS in video compression "like VP9" (D5)..." The patent court is saying that Google's patent on ANS in video compression is invalid in light of Jarek's prior art, exactly as Jarek claims. The report cites Jarek's emails (documents D5 and D6) as prior art over and over. ~~~ DannyBee You are confusing a whole bunch of things (sorry, i can't edit my original response on mobile fast enough to correct a few errors. I think you took the wrong thing away from the "unrelated to the prior art" sentence). 1\. This is not a court :) In fact, the rejection is specifically not binding. "(1) The objective of the international preliminary examination is to formulate a preliminary and non-binding opinion on the questions whether the claimed invention appears to be novel, to involve an inventive step (to be non-obvious), and to be industrially applicable." 2\. As i said, they are saying claim 1 is not inventive, regardless of those references anyway. See 6.13.4 D1 is Jarek's original paper, a reference _Google_ gave, not Jarek. You are right that they have a long discussion of these emails, but then decide they don't matter anyway to claim 1 in 6.13.4. Perhaps you missed that. They even explicitly say that D5/D6 do not matter in practice. The rest is just random examiner prognostication. You'll also see they are not cited in reference to any other claims. Jarek (and the author's) claim was the emails are important and that he told them what they patented. As you can see, the preliminary ruling was in fact, that they are not really relevant or important to the patentability of the claim. In this case, they so far have explicitly decided it would be unpatentable regardless of whether he had ever sent the emails at all! (The claim they are patenting ANS, i have no opinion on. I highlighted a fairly small portion of the article i believe is shoddy reporting, and i still believe that) ~~~ allenz > I highlighted a fairly small portion of the article i believe is shoddy > reporting > Jarek (and the author's) claim was the emails are important The claim is: "Duda says he suggested the exact technique Google is trying to patent in a 2014 email exchange with Google engineers". Which is true. Neither Jarek nor the reporter claim that these emails were the _first_ instance of prior art. They emphasize the emails to show that Jarek was working with Google engineers before they stole his work. ------ codetoliveby But this is a bit of a dark area. Even if Google stopped pursuing the patent, who is to say that someone else wouldn't? ~~~ mabbo A court ruling against someone patenting this would strongly discourage anyone else from trying. ~~~ mcny Thank you. Sounds like a win win scenario for Google. If the courts decide Google can't patent it, it probably means nobody else can either. ~~~ brisance How is this a win-win scenario for Google? They’re attempting to do something that is strictly against the interest of the inventor and abusing the patent system in order to achieve a commerical advantage at the cost of the rest of humanity. This is totally evil in my view. ~~~ tdb7893 Their main goal is to not get sued. As long as no one else is granted the patent they probably won't be too unhappy. As a large tech firm just not patenting anything doesn't seem practical given the current patent law even if you don't plan on suing people for them. Once you get a patent another company can't get a patent for the same thing (and if they do it's easy to invalidate) and also the more patents you have the less likely you are to be sued for patent infringement as you could always sue them back for your patents. ~~~ amelius > Their main goal is to not get sued. So there's no practical way to demonstrate prior art without filing a patent? ~~~ mortehu Your question suggests their goal is to win when sued. That can be expensive. The goal is not to be sued in the first place. ~~~ x1798DE Not sure why a patent is a better guard against a lawsuit than clear prior art. If everyone knows you'll win if sued it doesn't matter if the reason you would win is because you hold the patent or if you demonstrated prior art. I think the actual advantage is "mutually assured destruction"; big companies accumulate large patent portfolios so that they can (among other things) have enough stuff patented that they have the option to counter sue or if they get sued they can find some way that the suing company is violating something else in their portfolio and threaten to sue over that. ~~~ cesarb I live in a different jurisdiction, but based on what I've read on these discussions in the Internet, it appears that in the USA the loser doesn't pay the winner's court and lawyer costs. Having a stronger defense could allow the court case to finish on an earlier step, saving a large amount of the costs. ------ DennisP If he can prove he published it, then he should file his prior art with the patent office. In fact, if he notifies Google of his prior art then Google is obligated to tell the patent office about it. ~~~ DannyBee He did, they include it as a reference, but haven't made any determination at all ------ partycoder If you watch "American Genius" (documentary show about inventors) you will see how some of the most important inventors of the 20th century wasted decades of their life in patent related litigations rather than working in more inventions. This stupid scent marking bullshit needs to stop. ------ leke Google's new motto: Be Evil. ------ akeck Isn’t it already published then? ~~~ seandougall Yup. And if I had a nickel for every time a patent was granted despite the existence of prior art... ~~~ delbel did we switch from prior art to first to patent a few years back? ~~~ DennisP We switched from "first to invent" to "first to file," but published prior art still invalidates a patent. The change just means that if two people try to patent something that they've invented privately, then the one with priority is the one who filed first. ~~~ delbel Oh ok thanks, I honestly got mixed up in concepts. Glad to clear this up. ------ eeZah7Ux This is a reason for using [L]GPL: explicit patent protection. [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why- gplv3.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.en.html) [https://fsfe.org/campaigns/gplv3/patents-and- gplv3.en.html#E...](https://fsfe.org/campaigns/gplv3/patents-and- gplv3.en.html#Explicit-patent-grant) ~~~ beefman Had Duda released his code under GPLv3, he would have quit his own patent claims, not prevented Google from asserting theirs. In general, there is no way to prevent patent claims on your work other than to defensively patent every conceivable application of it. That is why all major corporations have large portfolios of such patents. ~~~ belorn In theory one should not need to defensively patent anything that is published openly since the patent office should not grant any patents for ideas which has already been published. It is only if we accept that the patent office is utterly broken and do not check for prior art that defensively patent every conceivable application of public released work is a good idea. ------ Mrtierne Doesn’t really fit into Google’s primary revenue streams so can’t imagine that’s their motivation ------ basicplus2 It therefore fails the criteria to be Patentable.. If he informs the Patent Office, the Patent should be voided. ------ luord If the patent is granted (unlikely), here's hoping they uphold that "don't be evil" thing. Oh, boy... ------ trhway >A Google spokesperson told Ars that Duda came up with a theoretical concept that isn't directly patentable, while Google's lawyers are seeking to patent a specific application of that theory that reflects additional work by Google's engineers. and this is how you do it, children. You patent a straightforward implementation and application ("additional work by engineers") of the idea, and thus you effectively prevent anybody from _implementing_ and _applying_ the same idea while the idea itself is supposedly still patent-free (an additional bonus is that you don't even have to pay to the author of the idea :). ~~~ wb36 You can't patent an idea, only an implementation of an idea. ~~~ jjeaff While that may technically he the case, the USPTO has allowed the "application" of ideas to be so broad as to effectively be just a patent on ideas. There are a million different ways you could implement a "one click checkout" yet the USPTO granted a "one click checkout" patent to Amazon. And countless similar parents exist today. (podcast patent, online shopping cart patent, a patent on making 'toast' and on and on) ~~~ jeffreyrogers Having a patent doesn't mean the patent is valid. I think something like 50% of patents are declared invalid during litigation. (This obviously doesn't mean 50% of patents are invalid, since you probably don't go to trial unless you think you have a reasonable chance of winning). Plus, a lot of those software patents are not valid[0]. The validity of software patents in general and what qualifies as patentable with regards to software is still an open question. [0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilski_v._Kappos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilski_v._Kappos) ------ williamxd3 intellectual property shouldn't exist. ~~~ kankroc Intellectual property done right puts bread on the table of many researchers and engineers and is arguably a protection agains't direct Chinese theft. That being said, Google is really turning into a monster at this point with all their patents on random algorithms. ~~~ bgorman If I take a Range Rover, reserse engineer it and sell it for a lower price who is harmed? The society at large or a special interest group involved in the manufacturing of the original Range Rover? If you want to make money off manufacturing you should invest in novel things. Not things that rely on the IP system to generate wealth for you. China is booming because they disregard Western IP. IP is a construction that benefits wealthy countries for the benefit of the wealthy. ------ baybal2 That was discussed on HN almost a year ago, with me being slapped either for my use of colourful rhetorics, ... or possibly divulging on their correspondence. Basically things were like that: Google's side said something to the effect of "you are free to sue us, if you can" and a colourful comment on his income level. And after leaving a mail address of their attorney, they went incommunicado. ------ gregatragenet3 The US used to have a great First-To-Invent patent system. It disappointingly switched to First-To-File in 2013 and these patents you are seeing are the result. With FTI Google could use the compression technique without filing because if someone else later filed Google could show that they had reduced it to practice first. However with FTF, any technology Google might potentially use in the future, they must file a patent for - this compression tech, or one of the DNN techs they've recently developed. Otherwise they could start using the technology and another company could copy the technology, file a patent, and be granted the patent because of FTF. They could then pursue Google for patent infringement. In FTI they could develop and use tech without patenting it. in FTF they have to patent it because if they don't they'll lose the ability to use the tech to the first copycat who files. FTF is just continuing the trend in the US of making it harder and harder for IP to be in the public domain - moving more towards the privatization of IP. ~~~ dpark This is not how FTF works. Prior art still trumps the patent filing. ~~~ jhall1468 Prior art is a legal defense. Patents are lawsuit prevention. Even with prior art it's cheaper to just patent. ~~~ dpark Sure. But it’s untrue that someone can simply file a patent for an existing invention and effectively steal it from the inventor. Filing the patent can minimize legal headaches, though. (To the extent that a bad actor _can_ “steal” an invention, FTF vs FTI is irrelevant.)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Charles Carreon finally quits fighting, calls Oatmeal battle “a dumb thing” - jere http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/charles-carreon-withdraws-final-appeal-says-entire-affair-was-a-dumb-thing/ ====== mikestew "he suggested that his Buddhist religion can help him forgive those who have wronged him." Hmm, anyone care to count how many points he fails to get on the Eightfold Noble Path[0] scale during this incident? He goes on to complain that potential clients Google him and they don't get to see what a great guy he is. I would argue that the current Google search results give potential clients all of the information they require to make an informed decision when considering him as legal representation. [0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_Noble_Path](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_Noble_Path) ------ OriginalAT I don't believe this guy. His original filing was ridiculous, and now he thinks he is a victim? He talks about all the books he has written and how smart he is, and yet all the evidence I see in this whole situation doesn't really speak to that intelligence. I am glad he has finally dropped everything. Some charities even got some funds from the situation so I guess it wasn't all bad. ------ anotherevan “I’m always learning.” Is it just me, or does he seem to have taken every situation and learnt the wrong lesson? Perhaps it’s not everybody else that’s the problem... “If somebody is making me do stuff by suing me, sure, it’s taking a bite out of my time.” Looks like he failed to learn what irony is, too.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
If Men Could Menstruate - sturza https://ww3.haverford.edu/psychology/ddavis/p109g/steinem.menstruate.html ====== empiricallytrue outrageous nonsense, and racist to boot. ~~~ sturza are not unable to entertain a thought without accepting it? ~~~ empiricallytrue I entertained it, it didn't entertain me. ~~~ sturza why?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Tragically Comedic Security Flaw in MySQL - stfu https://community.rapid7.com/community/metasploit/blog/2012/06/11/cve-2012-2122-a-tragically-comedic-security-flaw-in-mysql ====== kator From user command line: for i in `seq 1 1000`; do mysql -u root --password=bad -h 127.0.0.1 2>/dev/null; done Confirmed it gets in easily on: Ubuntu 11.10 (GNU/Linux 3.0.0-14-server x86_64) mysql 5.1.62-0ubuntu0.11.10.1 Does not seem to apply to: 5.1.58-1ubuntu1 ------ kator Quick way you can check for the memcmp issue in your libc: <http://pastie.org/4064638>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Silicon Valley startups rein in spending and prepare for layoffs - apsec112 http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/11/silicon-valley-start-ups-rein-in-spending-and-prepare-for-layoffs.html ====== dimgl I found this particular quote from the article interesting. > Margaret Quigley, 27, a techie with some coding experience, is on the hunt > for a job in San Francisco. > Quigley, who previously worked at a popular consumer start-up, has been job > hunting for five months. She recently rejected one start-up's offer, a one- > to two-month tryout — without pay. Quigley said she has also rejected > multiple sales job offers and an offer that was in the right field but came > in too low. I'm sorry but... what? Not everyone can do software development. This bit makes it seem like any person who is considered a techie can now land a cushy job. If you don't know what you're doing, expect really bad offers. Maybe take an internship and make a name for yourself. I had to work basically minimum wage for about six months at my first startup gig and that propelled me to what I'm doing today. Not sure what that bit was about. > It's a tough time to be job hunting in Silicon Valley, and things are about > to get a lot harder for individuals with certain skills. I just got a job in the Bay Area so again, I don't think these are valid points in this article. ~~~ FLUX-YOU >If you don't know what you're doing, expect really bad offers. An offer for a one/two-month tryout without pay has nothing to do with their skills. That's just someone trying to get some cheap labor. ~~~ matt_wulfeck Knowing what I make now I would consider 3 months without pay nothing to have my foot in the door. That being said I would never work three months without pay, but it's a risk some people are willing to take. I don't see any reason why it has to be without pay. "Under market" maybe but not without pay. ~~~ the_mitsuhiko Nobody should ever take unpaid internships. The whole concept is ridiculous and exploitation. Contributing to Open Source instead is a much better foot in the door and you don't end up working for free for others. ~~~ themartorana You'll likely meet (virtually, anyway) just as many influential people and won't feel horribly taken advantage of. ------ gonyea So, "Startup" to them = private, bloated company? I'm guessing they're talking about the "startups" who hemorrhage money on a trendy office location and uncomfortable chairs. It'd be cool if we had a different name for being several rounds deep, private, and profitless. ~~~ mjolk Even if "we" (meaning HackerNews users or engineers) come up with a better term (e.g. "a company"), it won't get picked up by the media. Old media has schadenfreude for technology companies failing and they use "startup" as a code-word for their tone that tech companies are irresponsible, lazy, out of touch, and not doing "real" work. They have no idea what we do, how we do it, and they want to sell to their audience and themselves the idea that we'll get some comeuppance. It's telling the horse breeder that the "whole auto-mobile thing" is just a fad by people trying to ruin "honest work." It's gross. For examples, I didn't even have to leave the linked article: \- The link off the article: "Silicon Valley's reality: The party is over" Yes, the whole 16 hour work-day for potentially valueless-shares "party." Excuse me if I'm not wearing my party hat. You'd never see "Coal miner's reality: The underground rave is over", nor would you see them taking a shot at executive compensation in the banking industry. \- From the article: "Margaret Quigley, 27, a techie with some coding experience, is on the hunt for a job in San Francisco...there is literally Airbnb — for cats!...'Do I see value in the platform?'.. she has also rejected multiple sales job offers" Ah yes, the non-programmer vague "sales techie" living in the modern day political and corporate Gomorrah and a trivialization of the tech industry. Yes, quip about some startup no one has heard of and avoid talking about a company like SpaceX that is inarguably changing the world by doing things at the scale of NASA. \- "The candidate wanted more money, the opportunity to work from home three days a week and to set the hours. Six months ago the company scrapped free in- office yoga and massages." Again, trying to paint tech workers (with these demands, he/she was likely an engineer) as spoiled, pampered children. The rare/uncommon perks exist because it's hard to find people capable of doing the engineering work, and once you find those people, it's very easy for them to be ground down to a nub. Funny that CNBC isn't brave enough to talk about the perks that politicians receive from lobbying groups. ~~~ untog Paranoid much? The media calls these large companies "startups" because the companies themselves do it. Because it makes them sound hip and trendy and worth investing in. No doubt there are companies like SpaceX doing notable stuff. No doubt they are a minority. AirBnb for cats exists. Vessyl exists. ~~~ jerf "Paranoid much?" Well, remember what working in the media is like. It's an industry where writing opportunities are contracting, advertising is stronger than ever, pretty much all but the top tier of newspaper is writing clickbait, it's perceived that there's little prospect of it getting better, and they compete with Congress for major institution least respected by the public. I wouldn't consider schadenfreude a paranoid theory, I'd consider it the expected outcome. It's hard to avoid wondering how much of the general tone of opinion in the media is a direct reflection of the fact that _they_ aren't doing well. (Are they worried about the "1%" precisely because a couple members of the .01% are buying up their entire industry, and they see the .01% showing up in the reporting chain? I've seen people similarly wonder if part of the reason academia is so pessimistic in their writing is that _their_ world really is in terrible shape and the sense of immanent collapse is scaring everybody.) ------ VeilEm Any kind of JavaScript, iOS or Android engineer getting laid of will get a job within a month if they want. Competent backend developers, devops, ML engineers also will have no problems finding a job. I recently went through a job search in the bay area and only applied at places I wanted to work and got a job at the first place I applied with phone interviews and in person interviews scheduled at other places. The job market is really great right now. If you're getting laid off, now is a good time. ~~~ Bahamut I'm not seeing a great hiring market right now for engineers in the Bay Area, at least as a high demand JS engineer. I took a look at testing the waters within the past month, I found the offers/opportunities a little wanting, and I am now debating whether to stick around at my job for a while even with some of its faults. The market looked a lot better a half year ago. Getting hired is not a problem - getting a really nice job though is much more difficult, especially due to all of the companies that like to talk a nice game but are disguising weak aspects of the company such as leadership/management, quality engineering, work-life balance, etc. An aside, that popup iframe with video on the top as you scrolled down is one of the most annoying dark UX patterns I've encountered in a news site. It is one of a handful times where I used Chrome's element inspector to set display: none. ~~~ optimusclimb > I'm not seeing a great hiring market right now for engineers in the Bay > Area, at least as a high demand JS engineer. Can you explain this further? If by "high demand JS engineer" you mean "front end" and not just node (which is not bad or anything btw), and by "high demand" specifically you mean you are: * you understand JS well, doesn't mean we get to grill you on all the weird corner cases - but you understand the language * want to work with a modern stack (i.e. react, flux/redux/whatever, backbone, that sort of thing) * are mature and want to help grow a team, can communicate with PMs and all that effectively we'd kill to hire you (250-300 person company.) Every friend of mine that has started a company asks me every time they see me if I know a good front end person (that isn't busy counting their RSUs at Uber, etc and isn't going anywhere.) Our company (in general) and team has more than one designer focused on bringing a good experience to the table, before it even gets to the code level. To translate, that doesn't mean our reqs go from sales person to "make it do this now, code monkey", but rather we want to make good, long lasting products, in a thoughtful manner. And still, finding someone is tough. So I find it hard to believe the hiring market for what you describe isn't great. Personally, my experience is all back end. I consider myself a good engineer in general, and feel I could ramp up to being a decent front end engineer in 3-12 months time depending on how much depth we're talking, but think that things are specialized enough now that that would be a waste of effort, and plenty of people would still be better than me. However, from what I've seen, being a F.E. eng that understands CSci and what's happening under the hood should make you SUPER in demand right now. I'm not trying to make this a hiring post, but if you'd like a fun job with a decent company trying to expand its front end capacity on this coast, with a relatively green field project (i.e. you get to build new stuff), and at a place making real money, not just selling to other startups, and not in a moon shot social space, PM me. If not, I'd still be curious why you think being a "high demand JS engineer" isn't a good spot to be in in the current market. ~~~ Bahamut I do Node.js as well, although it doesn't show nearly as strongly in my background due to every company I've been at wanting my frontend skills. I get pinged heavily due to being a major non-Google contributor in the Angular community (code contributions to Angular.js, Angular 2, Ionic, and am involved in the teams for Universal Angular, UI Bootstrap, and UI Router). Finding a job is still pretty easy - I don't dispute that. Finding one that pays competitively, respects work-life balance, and focuses on quality of engineering & getting product right, even if it means pushing deadlines a little later is much harder I've found, unless you look to the Google/FB/Netflixes. My current job meets most of those bars (a little less on the salary side, but I was willing to accept that for everything else), but only dissatisfies me on wanting to move faster & having more influence on tech choices. While there are no shortage of companies that want to hire, most haven't put their best foot forward I've found. The market is still good for software engineers, but it's noticeably not as compelling as it was just a half year ago - I feel like the balance has tilted a little more to the employer's side in the employee/employer dynamic. ------ abalashov It's an age old-question but I still don't have a good sense of the answer: When leaner economic times come around and tech companies downsize their work forces, they speak about culling "nonessential" employees and "growing smarter". How do they deal with the political problems of admitting to having hired a sizable number of "nonessential" employees to begin with, and, moreover, the obvious implication that their previous growth strategy was indeed "stupid"? ~~~ im3w1l Let's say you have a company with 10 employees, and a revenue of 50 million. If you hired an extra web designer you could optimize your website and squeeze out an additional 1% = 500k. Worth it! Times go bad, revenue drops to 10 million. You fire the non-essential designer and take the 1%=100k revenue hit. If you had fired an essential employee, your revenue would have dropped some double digit percentage, so those you have to keep around. You expand/contract the business to the point where the marginal employee costs you the same as the marginal revenue they can bring in. Well that's the theory for stable profitable companies. For startups I guess you'd have to think of the marginal _expected_ future revenue. ~~~ awakeasleep Ok, how does this work in the situation where you have hired management, the managemet gets paid the most, and their performance can't be accurately measured. Also you're not familiar with the marginal returns of the employees they manage. ~~~ tibbetts The output of a manager is the delta in the output of the parts of the organization they control or influence. (Citation: High Output Management) Of course that is hard to measure. It's all hard to measure. ------ angersock The interesting thing, to me, isn't so much what'll happen to the employees-- it's what's going to happen to all the SaaS and PaaS folks the remaining startups depend on. When everyone and their buddy is signing up to spew cash into the coffers of services like Amazon, Heroku, and other hosted solutions (instead of doing it themselves), those services can spread and grow. What happens, though, when that easy cash is no longer available? What happens when, for example, paying a lot for Docker or NPM no longer makes sense? The outflux of customers has the--in some sense--real possibility of killing those businesses for the remaining users. Look at Github, for example, as a company trying to run ahead of the curve--it can happen. I'm more concerned with what happens to ecosystems, like Node, that have VC- fueled companies as critical components. I'd love to hear other opinions on this point of view. ~~~ NotSammyHagar who pays for npm? ~~~ angersock You begin to see the problem. :\| More seriously, they're trying to move into the enterprise/private space--but they took on a hell of a lot of funding to accomplish that. Not looking great for the good guys. ------ econner I just like the last point: "There's still going to be major entrepreneurship going. Google itself was counter to the trend of the original dotcom bust." ------ drawkbox Startups that are born in or survive a downturn, they are more tight with better survivalism. When things get better they still have an advantage over other startups. Things go from tight to alright, alright and it doesn't affect them. Tightly run ships, like smart remote companies without as much office space (lower salaries outside SV) or many employees or even generating revenue run will probably not even feel a blip in most cases. It is the ones that are a while from a product and paying the higher tag for office space, salaries and more for the chance to get funding in SV. If that funding isn't there for a while it could be problematic and is the risk with boom/bust cycles. ~~~ tyingq I've seen a couple of comments where expensive office space or other somewhat optional expenses are cited as reasons for going bust. I'm curious, as I have no experience in this area, if that's really likely. As an outsider, it feels like salaries would be the overwhelmingly largest monthly expenditure for most tech startups. Such that things like office space, even a lavish choice, wouldn't really be relevant. If you were to break it down by "cost per employee" is there really a case where office space, perks, etc, really becomes the driver for failure? Where it is statistically meaningful versus the base salary cost? ~~~ nopzor I think your instinct is correct. If you're in SF paying market rate, with say a dozen employees, presumably your expenses BEFORE office space are in the range of 200K/mo+. Unless they're gold plated, your "lavish" offices would represent <~10% of expenses. Space and perks itself doesn't drive failure I don't think, but they can point to aspects that do. There are plenty of disciplined companies that appear to be "lavish" with space and perks. There are plenty of highly profitable tech startups that really scrimp on space and perks. It's tough to generalize. ------ dawhizkid It's the crappy startups that will go away. That's a good thing for everyone, honestly. ~~~ united893 It's not that clear cut, it can be random due to timing for startups that just raised. Name me some crappy startups you think will fail, I'll name you lots more that make a great product, but couldn't stay solvent either. ~~~ Gibbon1 Yeah I was going to say good decisions aren't made when investors start to panic. Or consider GM maker of fine crappy cars. They went bust in 2009. Companies are often long expenses and short profits. Meaning they commit to certain level of expenses capital or otherwise, yet their profits depend on near term sales. Business dries up, balance sheet goes red and if they can't borrow money, they go belly up. Rock solid business, gone. ------ obulpathi For startups planning to host their infrastructure on AWS, a better alternative might be to go with Google Cloud or other cheaper alternatives. This can significantly increase the startups runway, by lowering the operational costs. Google Cloud lacks some bells and whistles at this point but it shaves off 50% of your AWS bill. Edit: Here is why Google Cloud can save 50% of your aws bill "1X" is AWS Compute: VMs Price: 30% less + Per minute billing Boot time: ¼ X Network between VMs: Same region: 4X Across regions: 10X BigQuery vs Redshift : ½ -20X Big Data (Hadoop and Spark): 3X Disks: Read throughput: 1X Write throughput: 4X (Ephemeral); 2X (Persistent) Local SSDs: Read throughput: 8X Writes throughput: 4X Storage (S3): Throughput: 2X Latency: 3X (initial); ½ X (for subsequent reads) ~~~ patio11 _This can significantly increase the startups runway, by lowering the operational costs._ There is an old saying in business: "overhead walks on two legs." People are expensive; everything else is cheap in comparison. This is particularly true for most software companies, where payroll (and other expenses directly sensitive to number of employees) typically dominates every other expense. There are software companies which do $100 million a year in revenue on $50k a year in infrastructure costs. Bloat that crazily for a B2C startup making, let's say, generous time-to-market and inhouse-expertise-required tradeoffs. Even if you're spending $50k a month on Amazon, shaving off half of that buys you 1~2 extra FTEs. ~~~ obulpathi Let's look at Google vs AWS from people's time: * Ease of use: Google Wins(Cloud Shell, SSH into instance from browser). Its far easier to spin up an instance and manage it on Google Cloud than AWS with VPC mess. * Platform Cohesivity: Google Wins (See the comparisio below) * AWS has 2 storage solutions with different APIS: S3 and Glacier; Compare that to Google. Just one storage solution to serve all needs. You get a backed in CDN for free! * AWS has two queuing systems (SQS and Kinesis) and still require the developer / admin to adjust the scaling of infrastructure. Google has just one Pub/Sub. You get push notifications on top. No need to tune knobs to get extra scale. It just works. * AWS load balancers and persistent disks need warming up before high usage. If you are running a website on global scale, you need to use DNS geo load balancing on top. Google load balancers are global (as opposed AWS regional load balancers), no need of DNS tricks. No need of prewarming. Google persistent disks need no prewarming. You can mount a single persistent disk on multiple instance and share data easily. * Security: Google encrypts data at rest and at wire by default. Try doing that on AWS. Google takes care of SSH key provisioning and management. AWS: You have to do it by yourself. * AWS NATs and micro instance are known to be unreliable. Google has live migration. If something goes wrong with instance they work their magic behind the scenes so that you don't have to worry about migrating the instance to another physical host. * Automation: Instance id are not global on AWS. Have fun creating maps and stuff inside CloudFormation templates. Google Cloud resources are global. All resources (images ids) have a global identifier. No more messing with zonal vs regional vs global resources. Google Cloud can save money by saving your time too! ~~~ kasey_junk I don't actually have much of an opinion specifically about Google Cloud vs AWS. I will say for your argument to make sense you have to first prove that 1) these differences make for cost savings that aren't a rounding error when it comes to employee costs and 2) these differences aren't overwhelmed by the smaller ecosystem (tooling, availability of talent, etc) of aws vs google cloud. Also as a nitpick: >AWS has two queuing systems (SQS and Kinesis) This is a feature, they offer different promises/behaviors. In fact, Pub/Sub does _not_ offer one of the important ones that Kinesis does (strictly ordered delivery). ~~~ vgt The latter use case is easily handled by Dataflow (something that AWS lacks. See [https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/comparing- the...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/comparing-the- dataflowbeam-and-spark-programming-models)). One may also say that Google has a single Global seamlessly scalable durable message delivery service and Amazon has two that are neither global nor seamlessly scalable. Firehose is AWS itself admitting to this argument... And then there's firebase :) ~~~ kasey_junk I think dataflow is rad! But can you show me any bit of documentation that shows strictly ordered at least once delivery? I don't _think_ it actually does that. I'm not certain, but I'm reasonably confident that strictly ordered durable, globally replicated delivery would have to make extreme latency & availability comprimises. ~~~ vgt Dataflow is a fault-tolerant deterministic processing framework, engine, and service, not a messaging queue, so it doesn't "do that" by definition.. wrong product :) That said, one may order and dedupe the message stream with Dataflow using message metadata, time windows, watermarks and triggers. PubSub offers at least once delivery semantics. And I agree with your last statement. ~~~ kasey_junk Sure. I think it is fair to say that AWS does not offer a "Global seamlessly scalable durable message delivery service". What doesn't seem fair to me is to complain that AWS offers too many products, or to ding Kinesis for making normal/understandable engineering trade-offs. It turns out that while AWS doesn't offer a single "Global seamlessly scalable durable message delivery service", Google doesn't offer a single strictly ordered, at least once delivery message delivery service. Personally, I think thats ok, as a variety of solutions is great for all of us, but its hard to say one decision is better than the other when they are solving different problems. ~~~ vgt I agree with you, but re-reading the original commenter's argument, he was saying that with AWS services you don't get seamless scalability, even though there's SQS, Kinesis, Firehose. I don't think he was complaining about the number of products, I think he was making a point that most AWS services don't seamlessly scale the way Google Services do. There's an interesting blog in the works by one of our customers, who "surprised" PubSub with 4.5 million messages per second, and kept on this test for about a week. One hell of a load test :) And this is especially true when looking at the product I work on, BigQuery. ------ jmnicolas But but what about all the articles 3 months ago that were saying we're definitively not in a tech bubble ?! It reminds me of 1999 or 2000 were I saw at my local book shop a book titled something like "are you ready for the next 20 years of uninterrupted economic growth ?" written by 2 Nobel price winners, no less ... Then there was the (should I say first ?) tech bubble pop one or two years later ... ~~~ npalli The NASDAQ plunged from over 5000 in March 2000 to about 1100 in two years. That was a bubble. People getting laid off is not a bubble, if so, then we will keep having these 'bubbles' every year making the whole term meaningless. The very fact that 20 people jump in and warn us at the slightest hint (like this) that this is a bubble tells me that we are not in a bubble. Even if people get laid off they will find work else where. Funny thing is that this article talks about laid off tech workers finding work in Finance, which as we speak is getting decimated. ~~~ rhino369 How do you know if this isn't March 2000 all over again. A tech bubble would look different than in 2000 because companies didn't go public the same numbers as last time. That blunts the impact a bit. But it also hides the impact. If VCs go into panic mode you won't know about it until start ups start failing in high numbers from running out of runway. ------ MrQuincle Interesting viewpoint from Bischke: "startups doing something genuinely different just because there is no one paying them just to be another Uber for teddy bears". This betrays a lack of trust that VCs are able to judge the value of a company. That they really only invest in companies because others invest in them. Or that they invest in something they are very familiar with and are unable to recognize technological disruption. I've a startup so I've never been on the other side of the table, but I can't imagine that there is not also a survival of the fittest on the VC side. Perhaps being very early in a company doesn't pay off in an extraordinary fashion? How would the system not be autocorrecting for VC failure? ~~~ cel1ne "That they really only invest in companies because others invest in them." IMHO that's the business world in a nutshell. Being scared of innovation and changing the status quo. ------ gizi 70% of what they are funding in SV is absolutely nonsensical, while 70% of what makes sense is not even located in SV. This percentage is bound to keep going up. SV will not remain the center of the technology startup world for much longer. ------ jmspring \-- "Uncertainty in the tech industry is really pushing people back towards more certainty — working at a mutual fund, a bank, a hedge fund," Really? I left out the commentor name because of how stupid the comment is and how well banks and the like are doing. Re: startups, a bit of culling isn't a bad thing, painful yes, but not every idea is pursuing above all else. ------ shostack Just goes to show that sound financials in a startup without lots of outside investment expecting outsized returns are often smarter choices. What sucks is that many companies that are healthy and not facing layoffs are going to use all this doom and gloom news (that really seems to be trying to feed off itself and spark a downturn that is smaller than they want it to seem) to ride their employees harder, depress salaries, etc. I strongly advise anyone with any power over salaries and such to consider strongly that if your business is healthy, continue paying a fair market wage. The job market is still strong, and your employees loyalty will disappear overnight the moment you start trying to knock down their pay if you are clearly not in the same boat as over-funded/valued startups and just trying to take advantage of the situation. ------ jasonjei It's been a rough year already for SV software companies. Tableau, the poster child for big data, had their market cap drop almost by half this week. ~~~ techsupporter Isn't Tableau based in Seattle, not Silicon Valley? ~~~ jasonjei Geographically, that may be the case. But because it's lumped in with a clique of SV startups, I don't think being in Seattle detracts from what's going on in SV is also affecting software companies in the rest of America. (To be clear, I think "SV" implies the style of software companies found in SV that may be found elsewhere in America.) ------ mc32 Oh noes, they'll have to think about office space in Fremont or Milpitas... the horror and, and the workers will have to contemplate moving and paying a low 2,000 for a 1BR in the lower East Bay, the cost savings horror... But seriously, some trepidation like this in the market is probably good for stabilizing some of the office space and housing prices [employers being more fiscally responsible when leasing and employees renting more affordable places in the suburbs anticipating instability and reining in extravagant housing spending --I wanna be able to walk from my flat to the baa that charges me 16 per drink] ~~~ danans >employers being more fiscally responsible when leasing and employees renting more affordable places in the suburbs anticipating instability and reining in extravagant housing spending --I wanna be able to walk from my flat to the baa that charges me 16 per drink This statement seems excessively judgemental. What exactly is wrong with someone wanting to walk from their flat to a bar to pay X for a drink, and pay what housing cost they are OK with for that privilege? And what's wrong with companies paying to be in the same environment? EDIT: rewording ~~~ mc32 Wrong? Nothing. Sustainable? Except for Hollywood; not very; something's got to give. It's not as if most are getting paid millions per movie and could afford a year or two without a job [or hit for an actor] The point is, it's a bit short-sighted. If the rents were a slight premium, sure, ok. But when they are exorbitant as they are it makes little fiscal sense [except for those who hit paydirt] but those likely bought houses and aren't renting. In other words, save your money, maybe you'll have to commute and maybe the bar won't be as close or have all the cool people, but it's worth having money for when there is a collapse. ------ snockerton General macroeconomic scare mongering has an upside in that perhaps some fat will be trimmed. Those with a product or service with real value should remain standing. ------ cenal I wonder why [http://MatterMark.com](http://MatterMark.com) isn't covering more about this. I'd be interested in seeing what they have to say since their entire business is monitoring these trends. ~~~ askafriend They laid off a _bunch_ of people and went through a massive restructuring themselves. I'm sure they don't want to talk about it and draw attention to that. ~~~ w1ntermute Mattermark sounds exactly like the kind of startup-serving-startups that will be the first to disappear when the boom turns to bust. ~~~ nickfrost @w1ntermute We are not the kind of company that will 'disappear when the boom turns to bust'. Despite what you and others may think, we do not just serve startups or various types of investors. We have many enterprise level B2B customers. Our business is NOT built on the backs of small, early stage startups, which we likely won't even sell our product to. Also, if there is a but, it'll be us reporting the trends on it. ------ xacaxulu I wonder if this will temper the growth of so many 'hacker dojos' or 'code schools' churning out entry-level developers/designers with promises of near 6-figure salaries. ------ frik I want to read more news about startups, venture capital, Silicon Valley/SF on HN - 29 news on HN frontpage are about other topics (interesting for sure, but the balance is off). ~~~ dang Can you give some examples of stories that you feel should be discussed on HN, but weren't? I see a lot of startup stories here. I fear that part of the problem is that stories get posted, have good discussions, and fall off the front page before many readers see them. ~~~ frik > I fear that part of the problem is that stories get posted, have good > discussions, and fall off the front page before many readers see them. That's it, and I share your fear. I don't know how to solve it. Maybe it's what the majority wants on the top, maybe it's what a vocal minority with high karma points doesn't want (flagging/whatever negative news). I just see the end result. I would just like to get the big picture on the frontpage and not have to rely on algolia search for that. One thing I realized is that HN front page has very different topics depending on which time I check HN. It shifts its focus depending when people tend to visit HN from east cost, west cost, europe, asia. A useful function would be to check out the HN frontpage how it looked at a specific time. Let's say I would like to see HN as it looked like 8am Pacific timezone yesterday. I know about [https://news.ycombinator.com/lists](https://news.ycombinator.com/lists) , maybe add another filter to that list. ~~~ beachstartup _> A useful function would be to check out the HN frontpage how it looked at a specific time. Let's say I would like to see HN as it looked like 8am Pacific timezone yesterday._ sigh, kids these days. first of all, i'm sure this exists somewhere on the internet. start with archive.org and go from there. if not, witness: 0 * * * * curl [https://news.ycombinator.com](https://news.ycombinator.com) -o /tmp/hn-`date "+\%Y-\%m-\%d-\%H:\%M:\%S"` for bonus points, version control it with github so everyone can see it. even better, send it into elasticsearch. hint: curl -X -F -H you could implement a website that does this in literally an hour with today's tools. hell, you could even run it through some basic tools like python NLTK and matplotlib and twilio to text message you a fucking color-coded n-gram frequency pie chart every time it runs. you don't need ruby on rails, rabbitmq, redis, and a huge sql schema to do this, just a few lines of bash and python. this would be more useful than 85.1% of startups operating today, which is probably part of the problem. feel free to steal it. ~~~ frik I can do that. But it doesn't solve the root problem. It would be better if everyone can find insightful news stories and comment more. HN is so great because of the smart community and their comments. ~~~ beachstartup okay, then take it a step further. train a bayesian classifier to automatically notify you of things you teach it to find interesting. this can be done in probably ~200 lines of python and 2 or 3 dependencies -- i did it at a previous job. they are remarkably effective at simple tasks like "you might like..." ------ cdransf Why would you accept an offer from a company if you can't see how they are or will make money and, by extension, continue paying your salary? ------ kordless > the best startups, like Google, come out of a period like this Google isn't a startup. In fact, a company ceases being a "startup" once it finds a business model with which it can sustain itself. If a company can layoff a percentage of it's employees, slow growth, and still make money, they aren't a startup. We really should stop putting ourselves in double binds with stupid statements like this and reject them when we hear others parroting them. ~~~ adventured They're not saying that Google is still a startup. They're saying that when Google was still a start-up / very young company, it thrived in the post dotcom bust after 2000. ~~~ kordless I'm well aware of Google's history and the dotcom bubble that occurred from 1999-2003. I'm also aware that Google made $19M in revenue on a loss of $14 million in 2000 and I'm saying the company Google _was_ at that time can't be considered a "startup". It's a contentious point, clearly. ------ sjg007 Honestly just stop reading the news. They just make sensationalist headlines as click bait. ------ tmaly this is no different then what happened in 2000/2001 companies with high fixed costs and little or no revenue went belly up ------ quattrofan The Pop that has been too long coming... ------ beatpanda G O O D.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How Snowden Escaped - SG- http://news.nationalpost.com/features/how-edward-snowden-escaped-hong-kong ====== chatmasta I don't understand how Snowden was able to fly from HK to Moscow. Was his passport revoked after leaving HK? It seems strange that the US requested extradition from HK but would not revoke his passport.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
HTML 101 – Limited Time Free 2+ hour course - rheaverma http://classes.coursebirdie.com/courses/getting-started-with-html ====== Ritabhakhyan Can I access the benefits mentioned on Coursebirdie's homepage? ~~~ rheaverma Yes, you can access benefits when you sign up. ------ rheaverma If you have any questions, feel free to ask.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Slickmap CSS file to map out sites during design - davidandgoliath http://astuteo.com/slickmap ====== ivan_ah Neat. This reminds of a prerequisite charts for university courses[1,2]. _______ [1] <http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/labs-schema/> [2] <http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/prerequisite-chart/> ~~~ davidandgoliath You've just reminded me of the time I spent parsing through university course books -- what a nightmare; I have to assume these days they've improved on the process of 'look up course #, turn to the back of a separate book, dig through an array of numbers and hope for the best..' Somehow through it all I ended up in three calculus courses simultaneously and decided university wasn't for me. ------ lostsock This is actually from July 2009. Not that it matters all that much as I'm sure it is still useful but I thought I should point it out. ~~~ davidandgoliath Sure is! :) Just found out about it earlier today and it'll come in handy for a site redesign I'm doing, thought I'd spread the word. ------ jgeerts That's beautiful, also the fact that you think about restful url's beforehand is a big plus. It's also good to think about the language/terms that you want to use throughout your application. ------ bunkat Are site maps still a thing? I don't remember the last time I actually saw one. Still pretty nice though, lots of other users for this type of chart. ~~~ atlbeer I'm about to use it for documentation and reference purposes. It feels like a great tool for that ------ thezilch Not just "sites;" I can see this being great for some API's topology.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Sel4: We’re going open source - wglb http://sel4.systems/ ====== StefanKarpinski This is an awful lot of fanfare for the open sourcing of something that was funded with public money by the government of Australia, using open source tools and technologies. Why isn't it already open source? In general, I would like to see more software developed with public research funding required to be open source as part of the grant stipulation, ideally from early on. Too often tax-payer money is used to develop software which then ends up being closed source and providing profit to some commercial entity, instead of benefiting, you know, the people who payed for it – the public. ~~~ nl _Why isn 't it already open source?_ Not sure if you are Australian or not, but - unlike the in the US - in Australia there is no assumption that publicly funded work will be in the public domain. Generally the way it works here is that bodies like Nicta (and CSIRO) are expected to make a return on the investments that are made in them - ie, they are expected to make money somehow. The default way they do that is generally IP licensing. Personally I think this is very short sighted, but it shouldn't surprise anyone. ~~~ daveasdf Just a little bit more on this: NICTA was originally set up as a research group by the Australian Government with the explicit mandate of commercialising its research. The OKL4 and seL4 microkernels developed by NICTA were commercialised through the company Open Kernel Labs, which was subsequently acquired by General Dynamics (who thus acquired the IP of both projects). At NICTA, we are very happy to see seL4 finally being open sourced: we really do want to see our work be used as widely as possible, and open sourcing it is going to be the best way of this happening. (So, in response to the grandparent thread, that is why we are making a big fanfare: _we_ are excited, even if nobody else is.) ~~~ walterbell Will there be future work with Genode, e.g. is the codebase going to stay focused on ARM or will it also support x86? [http://genode.org/documentation/articles/genode-on- okl4](http://genode.org/documentation/articles/genode-on-okl4) ~~~ daveasdf The seL4 kernel currently supports the ARMv6, ARMv7 and x86 architectures, though the proof only applies to ARMv6. I am not sure what Genode's plans are. seL4 is a different kernel to OKL4, with a substantially different API, so it will be quite some work to move it across from OKL4 to seL4. ------ hackuser Could someone with expertise in this area share what is really meant by "end- to-end proof of implementation correctness and security enforcement", and the practical implications of it? The words suggest that the kernel is 'proven' to be absolutely secure, which obviously is false (and I don't think the authors are trying to make that claim). So what are the precise implications for confidentiality, availability, and integrity? ~~~ deadgrey19 Source: I have worked at NICTA, with the seL4 team, on the seL4 project, I've seen the seL4 source code and am (was?) a primary author of the user manual. What they mean by this is that they have specified certain properties at a high level in a logical reasoning language they call HOL. These properties are things like the kernel will never reference a null pointer, or, the kernel will always run the next runable thread, or no application can access the memory of another application, or, a capability invocation will always terminate. They then wrote a runable version of the kernel in Haskell (a purely functional language) and they have a mechanically checked mathematical proof that the Haskell code implements these features/properties. They then wrote a (nearly entirely) C implementation of the kernel and, under a relatively small set of preconditions, proved that the the C code exactly (no more, no less) implements the Haskell code, which implements these correctness and security properties. A nasty side effect of this effort is that the C code is very strange, since it is more or less translated Haskell code, and the kernel code must necessarily be VERY small, about 10,000 lines of code, which is practically nothing for an operating system kerenl (it is a micro-kernel in the truest sense of the word). Another side effect is that the API bears almost no resemblance with "previous" versions such as OKL4. ~~~ a-saleh Man, I have so many questions :) Why not just use the haskell version? What did you use to check the haskell version? What did you use to check that C implements what haskell implements? Edit: I have read [http://ertos.nicta.com.au/research/l4.verified/proof.pml](http://ertos.nicta.com.au/research/l4.verified/proof.pml), but I'd like to know more about tooling. Like, did you use agda, e.t.c? ~~~ deadgrey19 I can't answer all of these questions authoritatively, as I have more of a systems focus than a formal methods focus, but I can hopefully point you in the right directions. The various published papers and final release will be the right places to find all the authoritative answers. 1) Why not use the Haskell version? The Haskell version was (is?) "executable", but it ran only against a hardware simulator, never against real hardware. Haskell has a complex runtime which is not (easily) suitable to run directly on Hardware (although one student I worked with did port a subset of the Haskell runtime to work on top of seL4). Using Haskell directly would be slow, and would require the researchers to prove the correctness of the Haskell runtime implementation as well which would be a huge amount of work. 2) What did you use to check the haskell version? I was not directly involved in this. I believe the Haskell used to write the kernel was a subset of the language, they call "literate haskell" which was used to both implement and specify the kernel. This was somehow minimally translated into a dialect of Isabelle called HOL. 3) What did you use to check that C implements what haskell implements? A similar process was used for checking that the C implementation was a refinement of the Haskell. Again, a restrictive subset of the C language a tool was written to translate the C code into HOL (I think). I remember the team lead arguing that the way the C implementation was checked, both the code itself and the translator could be checked for bugs. AFAIK, The tooling was almost all custom except for relying on Haskell and the Isabel theorem prover. The group had a lot of experience for building and releasing the OKL4 kernel so a lot of the dirty work was already done as well as an excellent "Advanced Operating Systems Course" which whips and tortures undergraduates into systems engineers and ideally PhD students. :-) ~~~ a-saleh Interesting. I have already seen the approach "Lets design this in haskell and write production code in C" for [http://cryptol.net/](http://cryptol.net/), but due to limited scope (mostly functions of several hundered bits input and output as customary in crypto-primitives), they were able to check that the implementation adheres to specification automatically. The aim was to allways know that the c code does what it is supposed to, so that programmer can focus on mitigating side-channel attacks :) I wonder if something similar would be applicable to writing the micro- kernell. ------ webmaven <blockquote>All will be under standard open-source licensing terms.</blockquote> Hmm. Lumping together the mind-bogglingly broad variety of Free/Libre/Open Source licensing options as something 'standard' does not instill confidence. That said, perhaps they are using something standard, like straight-up Apache, GPL, or BSD. ------ sj4nz This will be pretty exciting for anyone learning operating systems. More source to read. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family) ~~~ deadgrey19 Beware, since the source is a translation of Haskell into C, this is not an entry level source tree and is not straightforward to read/understand despite it's small (LOC) size. ~~~ sj4nz If so, it'll still be interesting to see what they've done with Haskell to make a secure operating system from the L4 model--I assume they are also releasing the Haskell source as well, otherwise there would be no point to it all. ------ zmanian There seems to be a lot of utility here for folks developing hardware based public key infrastructure like BitCoin wallets. ------ mkesper Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth) Anyway, here, the Haskell code should be considered the real source code, right? ------ pkaye Does "end-to-end proof of implementation correctness and security enforcement" mean there is zero change of a bug or security flaw? ~~~ aidenn0 No. There may be a flaw in the security model that they correctly implemented. There _are_ bugs in every ARMv6 ever made, and some of them may allow crashes ore security vulnerabilites. ------ luckydude "In short, the implementation is proved to be bug-free." Has any smart person looked at their claims enough to vouch for them? ~~~ mlinksva Some discussion by smart people at [http://www.eros-os.org/pipermail/cap- talk/2014-June/thread.h...](http://www.eros-os.org/pipermail/cap- talk/2014-June/thread.html#16120) ... probably have to wait til after it is open source end of next month to say. ~~~ cottonseed You can download seL4 binaries and a copy of the specification (190 pages, no proof) here: [http://ssrg.nicta.com.au/software/TS/seL4/](http://ssrg.nicta.com.au/software/TS/seL4/) ------ anonymousDan Can anyone comment as to how feasible/practical it would be to extend these proofs to a multicore chip? ~~~ angry_octet Very, very hard, if you mean kernel threads running in parallel. However, if the other cores run separate kernel instances (machine partitioning, separate memory and everything) that would be more achieveable. UNSW call this the clustered micokernel approach. ~~~ anonymousDan Thanks for that. Kind of what I expected. I wonder if the problem could be simplified if techniques from deterministic/stable multithreading could be incorporated somehow to simplify the formalization ([http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2566590.2500875](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2566590.2500875)) ------ fsiefken This might become a good competitor for OpenBSD and the hardened linux. ~~~ AlyssaRowan Well, there's a lot of bits missing - this is a _microkernel_! But I've seen seL4 before, and this is a very solid (if slightly weird- looking) foundation to work from. I hope they choose a good licence; MIT or GPLv3 or GPLv2 or something. (It's a microkernel, so my general impression is GPL wouldn't be intended to spread between kernel components.) This could be a QNX-killer. Eventually, one day, maybe a worthy replacement for OpenBSD or hardened Linux, but it's got a long way to go. It's ideal for anyone developing embedded hardware, however, and L4 variants are already very widely-used there. Are you developing an open-source trusted security coprocessor? (I know at least two teams are.) Then this is probably what you want to run on it... of course, we'll want to check it ourselves as a community first, too, just in case. ------ rdtsc Anyone from RTOS community know how this relates to INTEGRITY-178B ? ~~~ daveasdf INTEGRITY-178B and seL4 are not related in terms of their source code or origin, though they do both aim at the same target audience (security and/or safety-critical systems). I don't have a good knowledge of INTEGRITY-178B, but as far as I can tell some differences are: * INTEGRITY-178B is a static separation kernel. seL4 can be used as a static separation kernel, but also allows for dynamic systems, for instance with processes being created and torn-down dynamically at run-time; * INTEGRITY-178B has a proof that a _model_ of the code satisfies particular security properties, while seL4 has a proof that the actual C implementation satisfies particular properties; * INTEGREITY-178B is certified to EAL6+, while seL4 has not undergone any external certification process. (Without having a good knowledge of EAL6+, my suspicion would be that the code-level aspects of seL4 would meet or exceed EAL6+ certification, while the process-level aspects would need work on the seL4 side.) If someone has worked with INTEGRITY-178B, please correct me if I have made any mistakes. ~~~ rdtsc Thank you for responding that is a good description. I remember someone from one of the government agencies gave a talk at in college many years ago about INTEGRITY-178B and about this separation kernel idea. That was maybe 7-10 ago. The idea was pretty neat. And the claim was that the future will belong to more secure OSes based on this separation kernel (microkernel?). And how say every little component -- memory, filesystem, mouse, display are all in userspace. He talked about ok general purpose computer at that time were too slow to operate in that way (so Linux was better and winning because of performance). But just wait some 10 years or so and machines will be so fast that it won't matter. So since then that story kind of stuck with me that kind of prompted the question. ------ mantraxC Hmm, given how compilers & hardware can introduce incorrectness and security vulnerabilities in otherwise valid code, it makes you wonder if anyone can really claim "end-to-end proof of correctness" unless they include the specific compiler & hardware in their proof. ~~~ TacticalCoder Concerning the compiler, in the link it is written: _" There is a further proof that the binary code that executes on the hardware is a correct translation of the C code. This means that the compiler does not have to be trusted, and extends the functional correctness property to the binary."_ (I wonder how that works but it is related to your compiler concern) Now even though the issue of hardware (say rogue hardware with rigged number generators and whatever backdoors) is probably a real concern, I still think that seL4 and its codebase where hundreds of bugs have been automatically found (and manually squashed) is a big step forward. ~~~ Avshalom On that note: what even is a correct translation of C when it has so many undefined behaviors in it's spec. ~~~ wmf What if the code doesn't rely on undefined behavior? ~~~ regehr Absence of undefined behavior in the C implementation is of course one of the things covered by the seL4 proof. ------ UweSchmidt Love the default bootstrap theme <3 ------ dead10ck "In short, the implementation is proved to be bug-free." This reeks of bull shit. "We still assume correctness of hand- written assembly code, boot code, management of caches, and the hardware" Sorry, I don't think you can claim you have a mathematical proof of the correctness of your kernel when you assume this much. And where is this proof? I can't seem to find it anywhere on their web site. The only thing I can find is the publication "seL4: Formal Verification of an Operating-System Kernel" [http://ertos.nicta.com.au/research/l4.verified/pubs.pml](http://ertos.nicta.com.au/research/l4.verified/pubs.pml) which looks like it just talks about the proof, rather than providing it. Am I just blind? This looks interesting, but the confidence which they espouse is very suspicious. ~~~ nl I'm not sure you are aware, but formal verification[1] is a well known and respected field of research. It does work, but it is hard to build practical tools using it. Nevertheless, if something is formally proven correct then for it to be incorrect one of three things must happen: 1) The proof is incorrect (which of course means it is no longer proven) 2) The prover has a bug (most proofs are done automatically). This is possible, but many of the same formal methods are used on the prover, and it is often build on a human-proved proof at the bottom. 3) Mathematics (the whole field) is wrong. This seems unlikely. In reality, the problem with formally verified software is generally that it must interact with non-verified software (and sometimes hardware - although hardware can be verified too). The wikipedia page[1] I referenced is worth reading. [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods) ~~~ josephlord 4) It meets the specification but the specification is incorrect/specifies sub-optimal behaviour. ~~~ nl If you can fix _that_ problem in the general case then you are about to be a very, very rich person.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Bill Gates was the Problem with Microsoft - rejuvenile http://maxmicrosoft.com/2013/08/01/bill-gates-was-the-problem-with-microsoft/ ====== yuhong My personal favorite is the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco (look at my reference to DR-DOS in the end for example): [http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms- os2-20-fiasco-...](http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms- os2-20-fiasco-px00307-and-dr.html) ------ passwert How did this shit get on HN? ------ angersock I'm all down for mindless fellating of Apple products, but could we at least hold ourselves to a higher bar? The author repeats "Apple makes the best x" for many values of x, but doesn't explain their metric or anything else. There is nothing to engage with here, just a lot of opinions expressed without stack traces supporting them. ------ Toshio I disagree. The real reason that microsoft is having so many problems today is karma. Their past is beginning to catch up with them. People are no longer willing to give microsoft the benefit of the doubt.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
FAA tests spur a fundamental software redesign of Boeing 737 MAX flight controls - sra77 https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/newly-stringent-faa-tests-spur-a-fundamental-software-redesign-of-737-max-flight-controls/ ====== kejaed As someone who works in this field I have to say this is a really well written article. Discussing topics like Design Assurance Level and failure condition classification(major vs catastrophic), Single Event Upsets (bit flips), safety assessments in a really clear and well written way. ------ jonbaer "A neutron hitting a cell on a microprocessor can change the cell’s electrical charge, flipping its binary state from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0. The result is that although the software code is right and the inputs to the computer are correct, the output is corrupted by this one wrong bit." ~~~ kejaed Also known as a Single Event Upset in the industry. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_event_upset](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_event_upset)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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