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You don't need a grid framework on top of the CSS grid layout - kawera https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2017/07/01/you-do-not-need-a-css-grid-based-grid-system ====== Brajeshwar Wow, it's been a while. Back in the days[1], it was a feat to do even a simple Faux 3-Column layout[2]. I made lots of friends and following on forums and 'mailing lists' helping and getting help with the quirks, and CSS hacks. Those in the know of such CSS hacks and their solutions got their 'guru' moments and treatments. The ability to fully understand the CSS Box Model, and enlighten someone was the pinnacle of your CSS Ninja tactics. There were the purists who would not write anything but in "Strict Mode". Debates on why "transitional" should be that - transitional. There were moments of triumph when Tantek[3] himself replied to your email, discussing his tan-hacks. Then, there was my CSS mentor/superhero - Philippe Wittenbergh[4]. I would email him right away to test my work on the Mac browsers, especially with that nasty Internet Explorer for Mac. This was before I was introduced to the Mac in 2006. Soon enough, writing up a CSS-Grid system for a project became second-nature and felt like ringing the bell. Hell, I even had a dead-simple CSS Grid that got some traction, which I later added to Github and people liked it, used it for a while. It is such a good feeling that "Grid" is no longer just a CSS terminology to mean a setup of patterns to build a layout but now a keyword in CSS that the browser understands and do something. We have come a long way. 1\. I think, the early 21st century - 2001/2003-ish. 2\. [https://alistapart.com/article/fauxcolumns](https://alistapart.com/article/fauxcolumns) 3\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantek_%C3%87elik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantek_%C3%87elik) 4\. [https://l-c-n.com/](https://l-c-n.com/) ~~~ mipapage Wow! What a throwback, I was on that CSS list and Philippe and I would do a lot of css writing and testing together, along with 'Big John'. I recall a day when this 'Dave' guy came by asking for people to check out his garden... ~~~ Brajeshwar Ah! Dave Shea[1] is awesome. I'm a big fan. I once asked him if he would do a site design for me. Unfortunately, he was busy. He was super polite and humble. Mezzoblue[2] was one of those source of inspiration to CSS enthusiasts. 1\. [http://daveshea.com/](http://daveshea.com/) 2\. [http://www.mezzoblue.com/](http://www.mezzoblue.com/) ------ smexy A fun way to familiarize yourself with grid is CSS Grid Garden: [http://cssgridgarden.com/](http://cssgridgarden.com/) ~~~ lathiat That is quite nifty! ------ onion2k _As if you start with old browsers, you limit yourself to their capabilities._ In my experience the design of a website is often done _without a browser in mind at all_. A designer uses an application like Sketch or Photoshop to mock up what the site should look like, and once the client has signed off a web designer/developer figures out how to build it in a way that works in all the target browsers. Starting with what the browser can do sounds like a much better approach, but that's going to take a paradigm shift in what both designers do and what clients expect. I can't help but think that's going to limit adoption of 'new browser first' for a long while. ~~~ jacobr Another problem is if a designer used to be a web developer 10 years ago, or has limited knowledge of what's possible, and limits the design to what they think is easier to accomplish. I prefer an uncompromised design and a designer that accepts my feedback and/or that I make adjustments if some design will take an unreasonable amount of time to implement or will have bad performance. ------ ourmandave _Create solid markup, uncluttered by additional elements that the past tells you that you need. Design your site using what Grid and other new methods have to offer. Then look at how you deal with the browsers without support, by serving them something slightly simpler._ Perhaps a fallback like, oh I dunno, <TABLES>?! ~~~ stephenr Tables don't work in a world that requires responsive layout. I don't want to be pinching and zooming all over the place to read content on a handheld device. ~~~ slavik81 HN is one of the most mobile-friendly sites I visit and it's still table- based. ~~~ npunt just wait until someone quotes someone and you have to scroll all the way over here ----> ~~~ garaetjjte Because this is not quote, but code block. ~~~ pbhjpbhj Or when the nesting gets deep and you have about 3 words per line ... or you're trying to visually identify the comment hierarchy. ------ TheAceOfHearts If you've been following CSS grid at all, or if you look up anything related to it, you'll probably encounter something written by Rachel Andrew. She's been doing an incredible job at documenting and promoting CSS grid. In the past she wrote a CSS grid polyfill [0], but sadly it never got updated to the latest version of the spec. It'd be an easier sell if you could polyfill it reasonably on some older browsers, even if performance suffered a bit. Right now the last holdout is Edge [1], which is funny because they were the first to ship the older spec, going back as far as IE10 or IE11. Luckily, the next version will be shipping the latest spec. I've noticed autoprefixer [2] supports a grid option. I'd love a guide that explained any incompatibilities between the two versions. Getting a mostly working grid on IE11 and Edge would probably make it an easier sell for many. When flexbox started growing popular there were guides showing you could support most features on IE10 and beyond with little effort if you used autoprefixer. Since there are equivalent versions of most attributes on older browsers, you just had to be aware of bugs and gotchas. For example, the default value for flex-grow, flex-shrink, and flex-basis (and their older equivalents) changed between versions, so if you always had to set them. In addition to any incompatibilities between versions, all implementations were buggy, so you had to be aware of bugs and their workarounds. Luckily, they're all well documented on the flexbugs [3] repo. Considering grid is more complicated than flexbox, I wouldn't be surprised to find it has a few bugs. Does anyone know if there's a gridbugs repo that developers can track? EDIT: After a quick search, I found a blog post [4] talking about supporting the older version. [0] [https://github.com/FremyCompany/css-grid- polyfill/](https://github.com/FremyCompany/css-grid-polyfill/) [1] [http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid](http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid) [2] [https://github.com/postcss/autoprefixer](https://github.com/postcss/autoprefixer) [3] [https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs](https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs) [4] [https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/11/26/should-i- try-...](https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/11/26/should-i-try-to-use- the-ie-implementation-of-css-grid-layout/) ~~~ rachelandrew The latest version of autoprefixer has the old grid support off by default, I'm not sure of a scenario in which it would be useful to be honest. The spec in IE10,11 and Edge is solid, it just is more limited than the updated spec. ------ andrewfromx [https://gist.github.com/andrewarrow/63d4dbbf171e00b0b455e362...](https://gist.github.com/andrewarrow/63d4dbbf171e00b0b455e3623b8468f1) wow, you can say display: grid and display: flex in css? and then flex: 1 1 200px;, grid-row-end: span 2;, grid-column: 1 / -1; What browser support these? Like is it 90% or 50%? ~~~ stephenr where did you find this? Is there a page showing it in use? ~~~ rachelandrew That's the code from the example I linked, you can find it here along with details [https://gridbyexample.com/patterns/header-asmany-span- footer...](https://gridbyexample.com/patterns/header-asmany-span-footer/) That site is where I keep all by grid demos including a whole series of tutorial videos explaining the spec. ------ tannhaeuser I'm wondering how the Bootstrap CSS guys feel about CSS Grid, having just spent enormous work on porting the Bootstrap 3 grid to CSS Flexbox. I guess right after the eventual release of Bootstrap 4 there's going to be Bootstrap 5 based on CSS Grid, making "container", "row" and other divitis optional? But that's sure going to be another sh*tload of work with all the QA and corner cases. ~~~ qw Considering the issues with IE11, Flexbox still has a few more years left if you have big enterprise customers (or the government) ------ usaphp I could not understand how can you set a custom height for one of your grid items, and then align it top/bottom/center for example. ~~~ rado By setting the cell as flex with flex-direction: column. And wrapping the content in an extra div. This bothers me too, so advanced yet worse than tables in vertical alignment. Or am I missing something? ~~~ rachelandrew Grid also implements Box Alignment, just like flexbox. You can align the item inside the grid area. [https://rachelandrew.co.uk/css/cheatsheets/box- alignment](https://rachelandrew.co.uk/css/cheatsheets/box-alignment) ------ slaymaker1907 The title is kind of misleading. It seems to be arguing that the new CSS grid layout is extremely powerful, but the title implies otherwise. ~~~ jordache no the sentiment from the article was communicated precisely in the title for me. ~~~ prophesi No, it's clickbaity and does not accurately depict what the article is describing. It's not dismissing grids, but encouraging the eventually-to-be- standard CSS grid. ~~~ jordache it clearly says you don't need a grid framework. gride framework != css grid layout specs	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Why is still so hard to detect spam? - nkkollaw I'm using macOS Mail as a secondary client alongside Google Inbox (which works great), and it's amazing how bad the spam filter is.<p>I've been training it to detect spam by marking emails manually for about 2 weeks, and it's still having a hard time recognising most spam emails.<p>I know that spammers get clever trying to trick spam filters, but I feel like some emails are really a no-brainer they're spam: for instance, I'm getting hundreds of email in Chinese, and I don't even have a Chinese font installed (which is information I assume macOS could potentially have access to). What are the chances it's <i>not</i> spam? ====== BjoernKW I'm not sure but it might be that providers of client-side email software that includes spam filters have just given up. Personally, I have been relying exclusively on server-side spam filters (GMail in my case) for years now and it works well enough. Server-side spam filters on the other hand cannot know for sure you're not expecting emails in Chinese. I suppose that's what these spammers are capitalising on in that case. Spam filtering on the client side is expensive, both in terms of the effort required to create the software and regarding CPU cycles on your local machine. Server-side spam filters like Google's use simple voting algorithms that scale very well. On the client side you need language models tuned specifically to your email usage in order to avoid false positives. These models and the training required are quite complex. Simple Bayesian filters simply aren't good enough anymore to beat today's sophisticated spam creation algorithms. It's a bit like an inverse P vs. NP problem: Spam looking like natural language on the surface can easily be created but verifying that it's spam is very hard, on a local level at least. ~~~ nkkollaw Definitely. Google Inbox has been a godsend. It works using feedback from millions of users I'd assume. Still, I think Mail could mark emails written in a language you don't speak as spam pretty easily. ------ beagle3 I'be been using thunderbird for years, and its spam detector works better than gmails for me - I haven't had either a false negative or false positive from thunderbird in over a year, and I do have false positives (but not negatives) from google. My mail server does do some gray and red filtering, so it starts with a relative clean slate (avg 3 spams/day over 20 addresses which have been public for at least 10 years), so that might be part of it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
(2012) Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election - luso_brazilian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-machine-facebook-election ====== luso_brazilian Context for the significance of this article > Barack Obama's re-election team are building a vast digital data operation > that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans > with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never > achieved before. > Digital analysts predict this will be the first election cycle in which > Facebook could become a dominant political force. The social media giant has > grown exponentially since the last presidential election, rendering it for > the first time a major campaigning tool that has the potential to transform > friendship into a political weapon. > Facebook is also being seen as a source of invaluable data on voters. The > re-election team, Obama for America, will be inviting its supporters to log > on to the campaign website via Facebook, thus allowing the campaign to > access their personal data and add it to the central data store – the > largest, most detailed and potentially most powerful in the history of > political campaigns. If 2008 was all about social media, 2012 is destined to > become the "data election".	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Broken Promise of No Man’s Sky and Why It Matters - webwielder2 https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/08/17/broken-promises-of-no-mans-sky/ ====== DamnYuppie Everytime I read about this game I keep thinking "it is a stripped down version of Eve Online with better graphics." I like Eve Online but it is not very fun to just jump in by yourself. ~~~ webwielder2 But...it's not that.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Germany's Giant Windmills Are Unpopular - blast https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-31/germany-s-nationalist-party-has-wind-industry-in-limbo ====== linuxhansl As a German I find that article... uhm... Interesting. I could also just call bulls*it. First: With a population of about 2m and as part of former East Germany, Thüringen is _hardly_ representative of Germany (pop 83m). That's less than 2.5% of the population. Second: In Bavaria the Green party did quite well (2nd strongest in 2018); and in Germany as a whole it does too. Edit: In Hessen (Germany's most populous state) state the Green party was the 2nd strongest as well. Third: I'm pretty sure windmills are not among the major reasons for the popularity of the AfD. ~~~ mrpopo > But in the first half of 2019, only 35 wind turbines were added — an 82% > drop compared with the first six months of 2018. Last year was bad, too: > Just 743 turbines were added, compared with 1,792 in 2017. How do you explain that drop then? ~~~ hannob Complex bureaucracy, a change in the law a few years ago that's now going into full force, lack of _political_ support (which is a very different thing than population support). Every time surveys are done you get a vast majority (here's a recent one [1]) stating that they support more wind energy. [1] [https://www.iwr.de/news.php?id=36393](https://www.iwr.de/news.php?id=36393) ------ Escapado I live in Germany and I am in the camp of those who believe that paying for pretty clean and sustainable energy source with having a couple of turbines installed and "ruining" the view of some places is worth it (as long as it is planned with at least some degree of care). But of course a lot of it is nimbyism as support for renewables and clean sources or energy is rather high. ~~~ Doxin And that's even if you believe the view _is_ ruined by windmills. Personally I don't mind seeing them at all, but there have been protests here against installing them off the beach. By now that windmill park is complete and all you can see from the beach is some toothpicks on the horizon on an exceptionally clear day. I really wonder what causes this split among people, why do some people not mind at all and other people mind _so much_ when they are looking at the same things. ~~~ acomjean I wondered the same thing. In Massachusetts there were protests that help scuttle the cape wind project.. Wealthy opponents (Koch/kenedey et al) litigated it to failure, after raising 40 million to “protect Nantucket sound” Plus Massachusetts. (generally has trouble getting anything done.) [1][https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1462962/cape- wind-r...](https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1462962/cape-wind-requiem- dream) ------ SideburnsOfDoom Unpopular compared to what? Open-cast coal mines and smokestacks? Nuclear plants? No electricity? ~~~ thatgerhard Yeh this whole thing seems like Germans are just unhappy with every solution, but I have a feeling it's media engine that decides this and not actual Germans. ~~~ api My impression is that Germany is like California. They love technology and certain aspects of high modernity but never want to catch so much as a glimpse of the industrial infrastructure that makes or powers it. They also have a similar paradoxical "volkisch" fetish for organic food and natural medicine along with their high tech cars and computers and phones and techno music. ~~~ xiphias2 As a European citizen who looks at fat American people (and death statistics for American people) sometimes in disgust/pity I prefer to stay with my natural food, thank you very much. As for wind mills I'm all for having many of them. ------ tony-allan For the curious -- German asparagus... [https://www.hardthof-pfrengle.de/2017/04/05](https://www.hardthof- pfrengle.de/2017/04/05) ------ neonate [https://outline.com/uZrvnL](https://outline.com/uZrvnL) ------ ggm This article mis-states vox-pop as a broad story. I would have said _" German's decide they don't want in-fill of current giant windmills with more giant windmills but overall like clean energy"_ is more like it. ~~~ hcknwscommenter Bingo! I think you have it exactly right. Sure Germans do, and should, dislike windmills placed in unfavorable locations solely as a result of distorting tax credits, policy, and the like. I do too. Any rational person should. That does not make one anti-windmill. Rather, it makes one anti-idiocy. ------ hwj I live about 2km (1.24 mi) from 4 of such giant windmills. They don't look bad, but if you open the window on windy evenings you may hear them. ------ gok Not sure I fully buy this op-ed's claims but honestly Germany isn't the ideal place for on-shore wind anyway. The capacity factor in Germany for wind is only around 20%. In the US it's more like 35%. So further expansion requires building a lot more turbines in a much smaller country. ------ Grue3 To think that with a bunch of gen 3 nuclear plants Germany could've been carbon neutral already just like France. ------ hootbootscoot bloomberg has an anti-renewables article at least once a week since, I dunno, 1 year or so? It's ridiculous. No one hates renewables generally, anywhere, this is largely a propaganda item being pushed by big oil. Bloomberg should show some leadership instead. Cue last weeks study in which offshore wind farm development even in only the select windiest stretches of global coastline provide over 30 trillion megawatt hours, aka about 10 trillion more than projected demand for next year or the year after, I forget which. Cue Mark Carney, governor of Bank of England saying that the companies that don't adapt to the climate crisis fast enough will go bankrupt, as it will cost increasingly more the longer one waits. He also suggested, vis-a-vis the current state of the global economy and downturn concerns trade war etc, that this is actually the PERFECT time to invest in Green New Deals everywhere, lot's of investment, big projects, now, keep that balloon open and use that momentum to effect the necessary change NOW! ~~~ recursivecaveat I don't know if you've ever lived in a windmill region, but everybody hates them if its in their backyard. _I support green energy, but god forbid it 'desecrate' a field within 40km of my property_. Suddenly every rinky-dink town has a _unique cultural character_ and every backwoods is a _natural habitat for endangered species_. Nobody can take even a little responsibility for the problems of society, its always _make somebody else pay for it_. ------ fingerlocks Is the headline a typo, or have we stopped calling these _wind turbines_? ------ ZeroGravitas Kind of weird how anti-climate change-consensus AfD and other right wing parties are. German polls suggest that the population is very supportive of the energy transition, so it seems oddly anti-populist to take such a position. Which suggests they're probably getting funded by fossil fuel interests and/or Russia. ~~~ s9w We are being bled dry by extremely high power prices. Left wing government has replaced nuclear by coal and opposes our fusion research. But somehow right wing parties and Russia are the baddies, and any critic is being is being [dead]ed within seconds. Right. edit: took about two minutes ~~~ egeozcan I am, within the boundaries of my understanding, for the nuclear power. So I'm not very happy that they shut them down, let's just say that. However, I don't understand how being against wind power helps this situation, at all. ~~~ samus IMHO, shutting down is not even necessarily the problem. Many of these reactors are _ancient_ , and the state-of-the-art has moved on. But lessons were learned and new reactors could take over and sometimes even help solve issues created by older models. ------ afpx Same in the US. 165 meters tall, loud, and built very close to residential. And, it’s pretty much just the rural poor (< $8000 / year income) who suffer, and they see receive economic benefits. ~~~ mikelyons Are they any louder in Germany than in Britain? It seems that by suffering, they are just missing the benefit of the quiet rural areas. City dwellers of most stripes suffer worse noise levels according to my limited research. One example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKgN2G9d0dc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKgN2G9d0dc)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Flirting with ideas - skorks http://www.thousandtyone.com/blog/EntrepreneurshipTipYouDoNotFindAGenuineIdeaItFindsYou.aspx ====== prawn I flirt with ideas, sneak off into the bushes with ideas, have affairs with ideas, but I can't finish anything. If it's not procrastination that kills me, it's not getting ideas to the stage where they're public. I know there are a lot of procrastinators here, but does anyone else get distracted part way through each idea and jump ship to working on the next shiny thing? ------ alain94040 Pretty good description of the world of ideas and why you only pick _one_ to really follow through.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Final project reports from 2012 Stanford Machine Learning class - admp http://cs229.stanford.edu/projects2012.html ====== forrestthewoods Maybe it's just me, but I absolute loathe the format and language style of "proper" papers. The column view heavy on text and weak on media feels highly outdated. They come across as a wall of words that almost purposefully seem difficult to read. It can't possibly be the best way to convey complicated information. I'll take a slightly less formal, media content rich blog post every day of the week. ~~~ Bjoern Coming from a research background I can totally understand your feeling. Once you have read enough of those papers, you start to kind of skim through them more easily. Unfortunately, quality of papers and their readability highly depend on the skill of the author. There are some papers which are easy and entertaining to read because of the writing skill and effort put into it. Many though are not nice at all. Here is an entertaining but serious one... <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/cocaine.pdf> ------ rckrd I particularly thought the "Analyzing CS 229 Project Topics" was clever. [http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2012/ChangSaeta- AnalyzingCS229...](http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2012/ChangSaeta- AnalyzingCS229Projects.pdf) ------ __sb__ For anyone interested, a few weeks ago, someone posted a paper on the popular data mining / machine learning algorithms that gives a brief overview of some common algorithms [1]. Someone also posted a few presentations on them if you just want a bullet point summary of the gist of each algorithm [2]. I just finished looking through both. They're both great if you're hoping to get some traction when it comes to learning ML. [1] - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4938162> [2] - <http://www.cis.hut.fi/Opinnot/T-61.6020/2008/> ------ donquix "Machine learning application on detecting nudity in images" Trying to make it awkward with the professor. ~~~ raverbashing I bet the part they most enjoyed was creating the initial training set. (if it's supervised learning they use, I haven't read the paper) ------ stadeschuldt All reports as a zip archive: <http://ul.to/6wix6k9y> ------ sharkweek I absolutely love looking at other people's ideas -- it's so motivating and inspirational. The ideas of others so often spark my own desire to get cracking on a few new projects. ------ biot Based on the nature of the course, I assume these reports are all generated using Markov chains or similar techniques? ------ ifeltsweet Some of the projects are genuinely interesting and if funded may have bright future. Note to investors. It's fascinating to see how many ideas there are, which are still waiting to be explored and conquered. ------ waterlesscloud Thanks for this. I've recently been focused on machine learning myself and this is a gold mine. The titles alone made me open a Google doc to list potential project ideas of my own. ------ tharshan09 great find! Wish they would go in more detail or contained a bit of source. However, I can understand why they would not open source etc to prevent plagiarism, bit of a shame though. ~~~ cosbynator There was a 5 page limit :) Also, there was nothing to prevent anyone from releasing source code, I'd imagine that a lot of projects are out there if you look carefully on GitHub ------ sonabinu Fantastic list	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Learning from Animals That Resist Cancer - dnetesn http://cancer.nautil.us/article/234/what-medicine-is-learning-from-animals-that-resist-cancer ====== skypather When I see the title of this article, I expected to see sharks on the list. Am I mistaken? ~~~ zeofig While actually reading articles is considered a faux pas here on HN, I took the liberty of opening it up and ctrl-fing shark. Looks like they're not in there.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Top start-up incubators - Finntastic http://www.startupsmart.com.au/funding/top-10-start-up-incubators.html ====== pg "Every single one of the more than 300 start-ups backed by the US seed fund has gone on to receive further funding" I wish this were true, but it isn't. It's been true for the last 2 batches, thanks to Start Fund and SV Angel, but before that the best we did was 94%.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
SINQ - Swift queries fluently - brmunk https://github.com/slazyk/SINQ ====== brmunk Will the fluent interface catch on now that Swift syntactically makes it nice to look at (as opposed to Objective-C)? Or will you still prefer a string in the old Predicate format?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What does gun violence really cost? - radmuzom http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/true-cost-of-gun-violence-in-america ====== kluck I love this article. It had to be said. Some may say: Its not the guns that are dangerous, but the people using them. Thats wrong, guns themselves are dangerous, because they make it easy to kill people.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Astronomers discover super-Earth around Barnard's star - dnetesn https://phys.org/news/2018-11-astronomers-super-earth-barnard-star.html ====== autocorr One of the most exciting things about this discovery is that because Barnard's star is so close, the planet should have a maximum angular separation of 0.22 arcseconds. Directly imaging the planet in reflected light from the star [1] will be no problem for next generation telescopes in terms of resolution and sensitivity -- telescopes like the 30 meter class facilities being built now or a hypothetical ~10 meter space telescope called "LUVOIR". Current cutting edge instruments like the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) can already get to about 0.2 arcsec resolution, but it operates in the infrared and can only detect down to about a Jupiter-mass depending on how hot the planet is. The really exciting thing about imaging a planet in reflected light is that you can study the composition of the atmosphere in much greater detail than current methods [2]. This is likely the first system that astronomer's will target when they seek to make direct observations of a rocky planet's atmosphere outside of our Solar System. [1] Ss opposed to the thermal infrared, which works best for young planets which have substantial residual heat from their formation. [2] Such as when an exoplanet transits in front of it's host star, the atmosphere will absorb some light. However it appears this technique is only sensitive to the very thin upper parts of the atmosphere, and we don't learn much about the rest. ~~~ EthanHeilman How many years is such a discovery away? ~~~ mturmon Luvoir is expected to launch in the mid-2030s. It is one of at least two exoplanet detection-and-characterization missions that is under study by NASA. ~~~ privong > Luvoir is expected to launch in the mid-2030s For others who are not familiar with the NASA studies, "expected" is probably too strong a word and "proposed" is probably more accurate. LUVOIR is one of four flagship mission concepts which NASA has provided with seed money. They will all be evaluated during the coming 2020 Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The recommendations from that survey will then be used as guidance for NASA. So if the Decadal Survey ranks LUVOIR as a top priority (the missions are all so large that it is unlikely more than one would be funded), and if they meet their proposed timeline, then it would launch in the mid-2030s. So it's not yet a given that LUVOIR will happen (another mission could be more highly ranked), and the timeline should be taken with a grain of salt. ~~~ mturmon This is 100% accurate. In fact, given the timeline, I’d be surprised if either Luvoir or HabEx, as currently envisioned, actually flies. There is a lot of technical innovation that will happen between now and then, even if the Decadal recommends one or the other. (I work on yield modeling for the study. I make plots and animations of observations, and the times on the plot labels have disconcertingly-far-off times like 2036.) ~~~ sandworm101 It all depends on jwst. If that flops, or even if it only goes as planned, without the spectacular over-performance expected of nasa stuff these days, future large space telescopes will be shelved for a generation At least the optical ones. My worry is that jwst will be too short-lived. It cannot become the fixture for decades that hubble has been. ------ Topgamer7 It would only take ~50 years to reach Barnard's star with a theoretical fusion engine according to a research study named Project Daedalus. Someone shoot a probe at the planet and maybe our kids can see some cool imagery! ~~~ rbanffy With 100 tons of propellant and the best imaginable VASIMR engine we could send a 10 ton payload (mostly nuclear reactor) there in... 2600 years. We need better engines. A Daedalus-class fusion drive would be a great option, but first we'd need to develop it. ~~~ taf2 Minor details - let’s roll ~~~ simonh Ok, I'll just nip off to Jupiter to mine 50,000 tones of deuterium/Helium-3 fuel from the atmosphere. I'll be back in a jiffy. ~~~ barrow-rider Also just a minor detail - let's roll ------ dvh Barnard's star is a flare star so the surface probably gets randomly fried. ~~~ chrispeel Because of its age, Barnard's star has less flare activity [1]. Also, from the Nature article [2] we read "Barnard’s star is also among the least magnetically active red dwarfs known..." [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star) [2] [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0677-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0677-y) ------ nategri "Super-Earths" are among the most numerous planet type in the galaxy. The term just means they mass somewhere between 1 and 10 Earths, and says literally nothing else about the planet. Why is this interesting news? ~~~ pmiller2 Because it's right in our backyard? At about 6 light years, this star and its planet(s) are the second closest extrasolar star system to Earth, after Alpha Centauri. ~~~ rbanffy And since it rotates around a relatively dim star, imaging it directly is much easier than a planet much further away. Also, super earths are more common only because we can find them with the tools we have. By looking at our own backyard, I can tell you round rocks smaller than Earth are much more numerous than any other roughly spherical thing orbiting the Sun. ------ JauntTrooper I'd love to see a simple, 2D map of our corner of the galaxy now that we've discovered so many planets. Something like the closest 25-50 stars, color coded by type of star and planets (cool/hot/gassy). ~~~ fhars Here is a slightly older overview of our neighbourhood (the stars haven‘t moved much since then, but you‘d have to add the more recent planet information): [https://zompist.com/nearstars.html](https://zompist.com/nearstars.html) ~~~ JauntTrooper Neat, thanks for the link! What I'm really thinking though, is a simpler looking map. Like a political map of the world, the kinds you had hanging up in your 2nd grade classroom. I'm surprised no one has made one yet of our starry neighborhood. I'd make one, but I unfortunately cannot draw or do any graphic design to save my life. ------ Tepix Are there any concepts for an engine that consists of a "classic" particle accelerator to achieve a high ISP? ~~~ Aic1kuir That's what most electromagnetic thrusters do. ------ commonsense1234 its only a matter of time we find other living organisms. The odds are staked so high against not finding any. ~~~ restalis Let's say we'd eventually find those other living organisms. What then? (BTW, the odds of that life to be a sentient one are much lower.) ~~~ dotancohen I posted this above, but it's a good answer to you as well. I think that most people, be them scientists, religious leaders, politicians, or even laymen, will have their lives changed forever by the discovery of extra-terrestrial life. For the religious, discovery of even extra-terrestrial bacteria will upend most of the interpretations of their holy books. Those books are the foundation of modern Western society (Do not kill, do not steal, do not take another man's wife, etc). By upending the basis of society we have no idea how humanity will end up. Will we throw everything based on the bible away? Reinterpret them? Will the Jews and Muslims reconcile? Will the Christians set out on another crusade? Will that crusade be to the extra- terrestrial bacteria to wipe them out as well? ~~~ dragonwriter > For the religious, discovery of even extra-terrestrial bacteria will upend > most of the interpretations of their holy books The religious might surprise you. [https://www.vofoundation.org/faith-and-science/life-in- the-u...](https://www.vofoundation.org/faith-and-science/life-in-the- universe/extraterrestrial-life/) ~~~ dotancohen Doesn't surprise me at all. There are a multitude of opinions. But the question was "what will change", discussing those that accept the new findings and have no need to change is orthogonal to answering the question. ------ HillaryBriss so, are we just-ok-Earth now? ------ nimish If Jack Williamson was correct then we probably shouldn't probe deeper, lest the Medusae find us... Would be interesting to see if it could bear life despite being frozen. ~~~ saiya-jin Well tardigrades wouldn't mind that much, but it would be hard to evolve to that point. The point is, evolution seems to find a way no matter how harsh the environment is, as long as the life already started	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Nassim Taleb on IQ - ptbello https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1076845397795065856.html ====== ellius I like Taleb's work. It's always good food for thought and frequently insightful. That said, his posture towards academia of late seems a bit juvenile and not a little annoying. Which isn't to say that he doesn't have a point, but it gets pretty frustrating when I pay good money for a book (Antifragile) and every other page is taking potshots at "fragilistas" and talking about how those dumb intellectuals don't actually know anything. In my book you win arguments by winning arguments, not by reframing the discussion so as to portray all of your opponents as hopelessly deluded cowards and fools. ~~~ rfrey The most salient anecdote Taleb tells about himself is the one where he's going onstage to debate an opponent. He asks his publisher if punching the other guy in the face would be against his contract, and his publisher notes that it would be very good for book sales. All Taleb does is punch people in the face nowadays. It's probably very good for book sales. He notes elsewhere, rightly I think, that the goal of anybody seeking PR should be to get the attention of somebody more famous then them: since it's much easier to pick fights than make friendships, and either will do, he picks fights with anybody he thinks has prominence. I believe it's a persona, and he's a very good method actor. It's also really annoying if you think some of his ideas are very good, as I do. ~~~ sytelus These days if you get in to NYT or Amazon top list, you are talking about windfall in range of $10M. For books like Fifty Shades of Grey this was at $100M for the author. So writing books these days is not poor author trying to getting by but a very very serious business. It's as serious as Series C startup with actual office, roadmap, business plan, marketing plan and even full time employees who would do research, citation collection, word smithing, editing etc for you. People like Tim Ferris and Malcolm Gladwell have made this to an art form and are some of the most successful founders for this type of business. The way they work is by taking couple of known data points in academia and expand it on to 400 page book dishing it out as fundamental insights that everyone is missing out on. Such books are rife with repetitions, personal stories, cherry picked anecdotes, raising underdogs and putting down others that evoke emotions but at the same time tuck away the other side of the story that would have made them more balanced and boring. I wouldn't be surprised if Taleb has made more money from his books then his hedge fund career and accordingly he might be more aggressive to protect his image as dispenser of great counter-intuitive insights. His assertions in these sets of tweets are obviously overblown. IQ testing is known to be very faulty measure for intelligence but at the same time lot of rebellious personalities including Einstein, Bill Gates, Lady Gaga etc have had high (> 150) IQ. No one would call them people yearning to be obedient salaried drones. ------ woodruffw Is there a coherent train of thought in these tweets, other than Taleb's disdain for IQ[1]? I'm struggling to understand why a measurement that appears to have _no_ value "measures best the ability to be a good slave," or why _any_ of this entails the belief that "the only robust measure of "rationality" & "intelligence" is survival." [1]: A position that, as far as I know, is neither controversial nor contentious in academia. ~~~ barry-cotter IQ is the most replicated finding in psychology, and almost certainly the most used. It is very far from being of no value. [http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatte...](http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatters.pdf) Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life LINDA S. GOTTFREDSON University of Delaware Personnel selection research provides much evidence that intelligence (g) is an important predictor of performance in training and on the job, especially in higher level work. This article provides evidence that g has pervasive utility in work settings because it is essen- tially the ability to deal with cognitive complexity, in particular, with complex information processing. The more complex a work task, the greater the advantages that higher g confers in performing it well. Everyday tasks, like job duties, also differ in their level of complexity. The importance of intelligence therefore differs systematically across differ- ent arenas of social life as well as economic endeavor. Data from the National Adult Literacy Survey are used to show how higher levels of cognitive ability systematically improve individuals’ odds of dealing successfully with the ordinary demands of modem life (such as banking, using maps and transportation schedules, reading and understanding forms, interpreting news articles). These and other data are summarized to illustrate how the advantages of higher g, even when they are small, cumulate to affect the overall life chances of individuals at different ranges of the IQ bell curve. The article concludes by suggesting ways to reduce the risks for low-IQ individuals of being left behind by an increasingly complex postindustrial economy. [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0963-7214.200...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.01301001.x) Intelligence Predicts Health and Longevity, but Why? Large epidemiological studies of almost an entire population in Scotland have found that intelligence (as measured by an IQ-type test) in childhood predicts substantial differences in adult morbidity and mortality, including deaths from cancers and cardiovascular diseases. These relations remain significant after controlling for socioeconomic variables. One possible, partial explanation of these results is that intelligence enhances individuals' care of their own health because it represents learning, reasoning, and problem- solving skills useful in preventing chronic disease and accidental injury and in adhering to complex treatment regimens. ~~~ freyir The point was that _Talib_ argues it has no value (above ~85), and then says it’s a good predictor of one’s value as a “slave” (very high IQ makes a good slave). In any case, he comes off as childish and bitter. It’s all filtered through the idea that success means being a multimillionaire, and everyone else is a failure. His perspective seems limited to finance and academics in that sphere. ------ DecayingOrganic _If many millionaires have IQs around 100, & 58 y.o. back office clercs at Goldman Sachs or elsewhere an IQ of 155 (true example), clearly the measurement is less informative than claimed._ it is important to distinguish the macro from the micro point of view. From the micro point of view, a talented individual has a greater a priori probability to reach a high level of success than a moderately gifted one. On the other hand, from the macro point of view of the entire society, the probability to find moderately gifted individuals at the top levels of success is greater than that of finding there very talented ones, because moderately gifted people are much more numerous and, with the help of luck, have - globally - a statistical advantage to reach a great success, in spite of their lower individual a priori probability. ------ saagarjha Stripping the article of the author (whom I don’t actually know much about other than he seems to have showed up next to Nate Silver at some point), I found this “thread” to be a bunch of personal anecdotes and “intelligent looking formulas and stuff” taken out of context to support the general conclusion that IQ is a bad metric for intelligence, as Taleb would know because he clearly has a very high IQ (note: this is something that he actually brings up as someone else saying about him, to give him credibility?). While I am not opposed to the position he takes, I did not understand the argument he is making the slightest. Could someone explain to me why this is actually legit, rather than what to me looks dangerously close to pseudoscientific rambling? ~~~ TEJOOS It's not pseudoscientific buddy completely legitimate ~~~ TEJOOS BTW r u a grad student at Cornell ? ------ thinkingkong Part of the challenge with measuring stuff is we usually stop when we have a single measurement. IQ is a repeatable thing but the problem - to my naive self - is that its _called_ intelligence quotient and the idea of giving it a single measurement is ridiculous as there are more factors than one. Intelligence is probably going to be a maximum within the system youre measuring against. Maybe high IQ is great for researchers and professors, but not for investors, or business folks. ~~~ closed This is a classic discussion in the intelligence literature. For example, the cattell-horn-carroll theory[1]. Usually meauring general intelligence involves measures along a bunch of different problem domains. [1]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell–Horn–Carroll_theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell–Horn–Carroll_theory) ~~~ thinkingkong Oh neat! Id never heard of that before. ------ simonebrunozzi Taleb. Love him, hate him. Always a lot of controversy. I like him quite a lot somehow, and there's clearly a good amount of genius in him, although sometimes there are certain positions and affirmations that feel less so (to me at least). For example, his critique of the growing inequality in the world [0] [1] amounts to pointing at dynamic inequality, not static one. This one never convinced me so far. To be clear: I fully understand his point; I simply disagree, especially while living in San Francisco and witnessing homeless people every day, walking next to VC multimillionaires. Anyone able to convince me? [0]: [https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892351059615789057?lang=e...](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892351059615789057?lang=en) [1]: [https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the- game-d...](https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the- game-d8f00bc0cb46) ~~~ petermcneeley Piketty argues for a wealth tax. Taking skin in the game seriously we see that for Taleb, a %1 er and his circle, such a tax would threaten a great deal of skin indeed. Such essays by Taleb are just an auto defense mechanism driven by self interest. ------ the_other_guy I like Taleb's philosophy that he unlike most successful people, downplays the role of hard work and rationality for success and attributes most things to what we call luck and chance. Being a wall street trader, short seller, etc... may require this kind of mentality since all rules and conventions are broken every day and having a 160-IQ in this arena will be even more harmful than useful if you use logic and science for every decision. However, I don't really understand his disdain for academia and theoretical knowledge, his philosophy won't get him anywhere where strict and disciplined logic is needed, the kind of logic that actually advanced the civilization not the one he used to make money off his bets from pointless stock charts ------ ronilan When someone asks me a question in real life I don’t focus on “Why”. I focus on “How” (can I help them). Most arguments down the thread seem just as moot to me, but then again, I’m probably not smart enough for a Twitter IQ thread. ~~~ bachmeier Nobody's smart enough for a Taleb thread on any topic. ~~~ naravara It's weird. Even though I agree with probably 80% of what Taleb is trying to say, he's just such a condescending prick about it that I STILL want to throw rocks at him to make him shut up. I'm not saying I agree with burning Galileo at the stake, but reading Taleb and knowing how Galileo conducted himself. . . I understand. ~~~ thanatropism That's his schtick. It's how he remains part of the conversation. If he had more than three ideas ("Mandelbrotness", barbell strategy, skin in the game) to bring to the table, he wouldn't be hammering screwdrivers through walls. ------ gmuslera I got two ideas from that writing: \- Is not a good idea to take a single dimensional indicator for a multidimensional capability. I suppose that know about IQs can discuss about that. \- That having a high IQ is not a so great predictor on how well you will solve a real world problem. If we define "real world problems" the ones with feedback loops, plenty of noise, and known and unknown unknowns (his field of work) then he may have a point. But that is a subset of the real world problems, and anyway you may have to solve ideal world problems too. ------ techbio The fact that some people _can’t_ survive in the market, and other people _don’t_ [even participate], meshes well with his “simple verbal test”: it only works if your subject is playing along. Street smarts are earned, granted. But IQ is not a measure of how many toys you die with. If the test is market survival, anyone who retires is a genius. ------ cheez I enjoyed reading this thread this morning. Makes some salient points, that IQ is correlated with success in a specific area (physics/academia). ------ fromthestart This reads like a desperate rant by someone who scored poorly on an IQ test and took it personally. ------ microcolonel Of course, if you submit a piece supporting any other take on these matters, it may not make it on HN. ------ fredch FOR THE RECORD, Financial crashes are not "black swan" events. I've never seen a black swan in my life, but I've seen two or three financial crashes. As far as I can tell, Taleb is just a memer. His degeneration of late is hopefully cluing people in, though the compulsion to substitute memes for thought will continue. Hey, maybe that's what IQ is, a person's likeliness to think instead of resorting to memes? Maybe that's why Taleb hates it?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Moodymann on Rollerskating in Detroit - pmcpinto https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/3544 ====== BenGosub I am a DJ and a programmer, didn't expect to see Moodymann on Hacker News, but kudos for this :) Moodymann is a legend, I haven't yet read this interview, but there was one video interview recently, done by Gilles Peterson, where Moodymann opened up much more than usually. ~~~ mikelpr there are more of us than we imagine :-) ~~~ yesbabyyes Likewise! Well the 1200s are packed down but I still know Moodymann. ------ adriancooney I love when my two favourite worlds intersect. Does anyone know of an electronic music news aggregator similar to Hacker News? I'm aware of some decent Subreddits but I still feel something is lacking. ~~~ mason55 Yeah, did not expect to see a link to RA when I checked HN this morning ~~~ thepaulstella Speaking of RA, I thoroughly enjoyed the latest podcast with a mix from Aïsha Devi. [https://www.residentadvisor.net/podcast- episode.aspx?id=699](https://www.residentadvisor.net/podcast- episode.aspx?id=699) ------ brianzelip D, skates, and funk "Sloppy Cosmic", [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vTfloaph-M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vTfloaph-M)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why is the result of ('b'+'a'+ + 'a' + 'a').toLowerCase() 'banana'? - el_benhameen https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57456188/why-is-the-result-of-ba-a-a-tolowercase-banana ====== perl4ever ([![]] + [][[]])[(![] + []).length]+([![]] + [][[]])[(![] + []).length + +!+[]]+ (![] + [])[+[]+ +[]]+([![]] + [][[]])[([][[]]+[]).length - +!+[]]+ ([![]] + [][[]])[(![] + []).length + ([] + "[]").length]+" "+(![] + [])[+[]+ +[]]+ ([![]] + [][[]])[([][[]]+[]).length - +!+[]]+ (![] + [])[+!+[] + +!+[]]+([![]] + [][[]])[([][[]]+[]).length + +!+[]]+ ([![]] + [][[]])[([][[]]+[]).length + ([] + "[]").length]+(![] + [])[(![] + [] ).length - +!+[]]+" "+(![] + [] )[(+""[""]+[] ).length]+(![] + [] )[+!+[]]+ ([![]] + [][[]])[([][[]]+[]).length - ([] + "[]").length] ------ ktpsns I like the comment do debug this as ('b' + 'c' + + 'd' + 'e') Which renders to bcNaNe and thus gives a good hint on what is going on.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
CyberSource outages Day #2 - spd997m23 For the second day in a row CyberSource is timing out and not authenticating customer payment information. We lose an order each time this happens. Is anyone else having this problem? ====== dangrossman When this costs you enough money, consider building your next payment integration on Spreedly. Write once, and you can now charge customers with 84 different gateways just by changing one token in your code. CyberSource and every other major processor is supported. You can vault all your billing info there and never be locked in to a processor's storage/tokenization solution either. [https://spreedly.com/](https://spreedly.com/) ~~~ toomuchtodo I took note of Spreedly months ago when patio11 had good things to say about it on HN. ------ tommccabe Had an outage for about 30 minutes yesterday afternoon (ET). Nothing today. ~~~ tommccabe Spoke too fast. Just started timing out for us too. ------ danuerysm Same here. Any ideas on the problem? ~~~ spd997m23 Cybersource's support line plays a recording stating that they are aware of a problem, but there's no info on their website. ------ dstark Yes, we experienced the same :( ------ flowerchs is this still active? just now getting errors.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
POTUS Twitter account is registered to a private Gmail account - Daviey https://theintercept.com/2017/01/26/donald-trump-is-using-a-private-gmail-account-to-secure-the-most-powerful-twitter-account-in-the-world/ ====== cronjobber > Update: Jan. 26, 2017 > An earlier version of this story did not address the possibility that two- > factor authentication could impede unauthorized access to Trump’s Twitter > account. > Update 2: Jan. 26, 2017 > As of 1:02 PM today, the email required to reset Trump’s Twitter account was > changed to what appears to be a White House address. ~~~ dogma1138 Also from the earlier story "People who followed Obama got Trump" story, it looks like Twitter merged or transferred the POTUS account Alias to Trump after the inauguration which means that all previous emails that had access to Trump's account likely to also have been transferred. I honestly wonder if there would be a way to look at Obama's old account or other accounts in a similar situation, I have a strong suspicion that it would not be such a different story. ~~~ flurdy Obama's [http://twitter.com/potus](http://twitter.com/potus) was renamed [http://twitter.com/potus44](http://twitter.com/potus44). Trump's @potus is a new account. ~~~ dogma1138 [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-apologises-for- forcin...](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-apologises-for-forcing- people-to-follow-donald-trumps-potus) It looks like Twitter did the switch. ------ froh42 Regarding Trump: I can't decide whether I'll see the upcoming events the next four years with schadenfreude (you've got what you elected, Americans!) or with fear and terror. ~~~ mdekkers Personally, both. ------ eksrow >THE NEW AMERICAN PRESIDENT’S Twitter account isn’t a means of communication as much as it is a tool for confusion, propaganda, and unceasing assault. I wonder who the author voted for. Whether or not you agree with the content he posts on Twitter, the amount of people reached to especially younger people seems a lot bigger than let's say a blog on whitehouse.gov. ------ teekert "The irony given Trump’s campaign assaults on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email service is of course obvious." I think it is quite different to be using a private email address (server!) you control absolutely because you want to deny the people their right to know your devotion to Wall Street or, you use it for a Twitter account. What's up with all this official stuff on Twitter anyway? It all sounds very unprofessional to choose a specific company for your communication over another, as a politician. What's wrong with a website or a blog or an RSS feed? ~~~ secstate Your last comment really rang true. The extent to which Twitter is being used as an official communication channel by so many is very disconcerting to me. Never mind the fact that Twitter is not terribly profitable and could very well cease to exist in five years. More to the point, Twitter is so simple on the face of it, why not setup a micro blog for the POTUS that auto-tweets everything. At least then the network doesn't own your content. ~~~ true_religion How s this different from press conferences except skipping the part of having the prsss write about what you said and waiting a day before the public can read your words? ------ NietTim So? Pretty sure that no state secrets are being discussed on that twitter account. ------ baby Does it really matter? ~~~ robtaylor Tweets sent out under that username can for example affect stock markets in real time. If something is built up as being the point of contact for the most powerful person on earth then the security of the medium is relevant. "I was hacked" would be a terrible reason for WW3 :) ~~~ baby > Tweets sent out under that username can for example affect stock markets in > real time. That's a problem with the market, not a twitter account > "I was hacked" would be a terrible reason for WW3 :) Honestly, I don't see what a hacker could do write, that would be worse that the current account. ------ tonyedgecombe realdonaldtrump@gmail.com ? ~~~ pluma Considering it apparently starts with "ds", no.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Logitech disables local access on Harmony Hubs, breaks automation systems - Deinos https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/logitech-firmware-update-breaks-locally-controlled-harmony-hub-systems/ ====== all2 I am sad to see that Logitech has fallen into the business model of technological churn. I've found their devices (I've owned a few mice, a keyboard, some speaker setups) to be durable, well designed, and comfortable to use. Their industrial and UX design teams are top notch. Somebody up the marketing side of the chain should do some math and figure out how to not disenfranchise users. Maybe lock down unofficial APIs and require authentication of devices (which legitimate users could do). Or something. There are lots of options that don't involve pissing off satisfied customers. But devolving into 'we want to sell new system X, let's brick some old devices' is a great way to drive people away from a brand entirely. ~~~ philtar What UX team? Their Harmony software is atrocious. It feels like a badly designed flash application. G Hub is broken as hell. LGS is kind of OK but not going to win any UX awards. Am I missing anything? ~~~ all2 I mean UX for their hardware. All of the stuff I've owned has been lovely to use. I've not had to try any of their software. ------ TheBill Google completely bricked their home hub, so on the bright side at least Logitech users can still use the damn thing. This reinforces my belief that unless there's officially supported API/CLI access & the end user can control (should they opt to) the cadence of updates - you don't own the hardware. ~~~ Wowfunhappy > Unless there's officially supported API/CLI access & the end user can > control (should they opt to) the cadence of updates - you don't own the > hardware. I would agree with a modified version of this statement. To own hardware, I need the ability to control software update cadence _and_ be able to use the device without connecting to an external server I don't control. If an API or CLI interfaces with an external server in order to function, and that server goes down, I just lost access to my device. By contrast, a GUI app that operates entirely on my local network is never going to stop working. ------ skocznymroczny That's why I never install any updates on IoT devices. They usually remove features like that and you can never go back. I'd rather have my device 'insecure'. ------ thescriptkiddie Shit, I just bought one of these, I wonder if it is too late to return it. I've just about had it with all of these "smart" things that fail to live up to the advertising and get worse with every firmware update. ~~~ com2kid To be fair, it looks like they are closing off some security vulnerabilities, and I'm hoping they wouldn't kick up this much of a PR nightmare unless the security vulnerabilities were some type of horrific RCE. They might advert this PR storm if this if they just document the vulnerabilities that they fixed. ~~~ bahnburner But this was a local API, so unless an attacker already had physical access to your network there should be no way for the exploit to be utilized. ------ dade_ I was surprised there isn't a mature open source / hardware design, but maybe everyone thought it wasn't worth the effort with local connectivity to their Logitech Harmony. Maybe now is the time.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Don't let sharedWorkers die - malko https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/315#issuecomment-244903762 ====== malko If you think sharedWorkers are for a better web experience it's time to cast your vote and say no to the deprecation of this feature. Follow the url and add a thumbs up :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
John Carmack on “Facebook listening to you” conspiracy theory - tosh https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1227234781886386176 ====== willis936 While I haven’t done rigorous science, there were times last year that youtube suggestions were a little too timely in regards to conversations I had within the past hour. Conversations that were relatively original, as in no participants or 1-hop connections had talked about the subject in the past week. Now you could argue that the great neural net in the sky can predict seemingly original topics based on prior data. However, since I have spent a lot of effort cutting google out of my life in the past six months (the biggest change not leaving chrome open) I have noticed this not happen once. Is there a reason to doubt the obvious?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
WebAssembly: A New Compiler Target for the Web [video] - jandem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RByPdCN1RQ4 ====== bluejekyll I wish webassembly was already here. I honestly can't wait for more language choice for targeting the browser DOM. I believe this will bring a revolution in client side apps on the browser. Ultimately fulfilling the goal Java aimed for, but never succeeded at reaching. ~~~ IshKebab WebAssembly doesn't really add any more language choices for the DOM directly. At least not yet: [https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/GC.md](https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/GC.md) ~~~ bluejekyll You're right that it's not part of the MVP, but it's pretty clear that it's a feature that is planned and will probably follow very quickly. ------ Animats Somehow, I think we'll regret this. Running low-level programs in the browser hasn't gone well in the past. We got rid of Flash. We got rid of Java applets. Now this. Especially since the use cases are weak. Even WebGL doesn't get used much. Yes, you can do (cool thing) in the browser. But that will be rare. Has the first WebAssembly exploit come out yet? ~~~ azakai There were definitely major problems with Flash and Java. WebAssembly has learned from those, though: * WebAssembly is an open standard, unlike Flash * WebAssembly has multiple compatible open source implementations, unlike Flash (and Java, back in the day) * WebAssembly is optimized for very fast startup, unlike Java * WebAssembly is designed to integrate with JavaScript and the web in a proper way, unlike Flash and Java * WebAssembly is designed to have the same security model as JavaScript and in fact to reuse existing hardened code as much as possible, minimizing the security risk. Not that WebAssembly is perfect, nothing is, but it's aimed to fix the huge issues that previous related technologies had. And the use cases are very important: things like games, photo editing, etc., all can benefit from high-speed execution of code on the web. WebAssembly is a response to developer requests. ~~~ Someone It certainly isn't integration with JavaScript that held Java back, as Java and JavaScript are about equally old. If I have to believe Wikipedia, both are from May 23, 1995, but I don't trust that date for JavaScript, as Wikipedia also says JavaScript was designed in two weeks in May 1995. Internet time is fast, but not that fast. JavaScript seems to have shipped as LiveScript in September 1995, but [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Version_history](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Version_history) also has March 1996 as date for the first version. Java seems to have been shown to the world in beta form in May 1995, with the first JDK available on January 23, 1996 ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history)), so Java seems a tad _older_ than JavaScript. I think a few important 'features of WebAssembly', compared to Java are that WebAssembly is going to come out at a time when: * machines are cheap and fast enough. * bandwidth is cheap and plenty enough. * the world knows you need open standards to conquer the world (or, cynically, that getting hold of data is the primary objective nowadays) ~~~ DiNovi JS was indeed developed in just 10 days[1]. It was a way for netscape to differentiate itself. It is also why it has so many... quirks. 1\. [https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_J...](https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_JavaScript) ~~~ Someone For me that is the believable part; it's easy to hack together something JavaScript-like using lex and yacc and also probably not too hard to bolt it onto your own browser. It would be reasonably bug-free, too, as there was no standard to test it against. I do find it hard to believe that Netscape managed to decide this was a (minimal) viable product, produce a press release, and present it to the world in the remaining (at most 21, including Memorial Day, but according to Wikipedia at most 13) days in May. On the other hand, Netscape may have heard rumors about Sun announcing Java (quite possible if Sun wanted to have a Netscape plugin to demo at launch) and decided they had to have something on the same day. I can't find that on the web, though. EDIT: [http://www2.ldc.lu.se/temadag95/javascript.txt](http://www2.ldc.lu.se/temadag95/javascript.txt) and [http://www.phase3.net/sun-announces-java-at- sunworld/](http://www.phase3.net/sun-announces-java-at-sunworld/) seem to show that the May 23 date in Wikipedia is correct for Java, but incorrect for JavaScript. That date should be December 4, 1995.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The first open company - zende http://blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746/the-first-open-company ====== amix I like the idea behind Gittip, but I think this is bullshit: "company are developed for the benefit of society as a whole, and not just the mutual benefit of the members of the cooperative" Most companies are developed for the society and for people and most advances in human history have been done by for-profit organizations. Even the ideas in capitalism (as stated in e.g. Wealth of Nations) are grounded in benefits for the society and for the people. ~~~ whit537 My point about benefit to society vs. mutual benefit was a technical one about the definition of an open company vis-a-vis the definition of a cooperative, "an autonomous association of persons who voluntarily cooperate for their mutual social, economic, and cultural benefit"[0]. It wasn't meant to be ideological. I love cooperatives. I started one: an organic produce growers' cooperative. I also love Wealth of Nations, and I love capitalism. The company behind Gittip, Zeta Design & Development, LLC, was started in 2002 as a for-profit company and was run that way for a decade. Here's me praising corporations: [http://blog.gittip.com/post/25215503687/corporations-and- ope...](http://blog.gittip.com/post/25215503687/corporations-and-open-ones) My question is, can we do even better? \---- [0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative> ~~~ amix Ok, thanks for the clarification. I had read cooperative as a corporation (or understood it like that). ~~~ whit537 Phew. :-) ------ crazygringo Please don't call this a "company" of any sort. A company that doesn't pay its employees is neither a company, nor does it have employees. And honestly, why is "cost" for non-employees allowed, but not cost for employees? An "open company" makes sense in terms of radical transparency, but a term like that shouldn't be related in any way to banning monetary compensation. ~~~ whit537 I daresay the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania disagrees with you about whether Zeta Design & Development, LLC is a company. Cost for non-employees is "allowed" for the practical reason that if it weren't, an open company couldn't participate in the economy as it stands today. If you want transparency without the non-compensation, look into B Corporations: <http://www.bcorporation.net/about> ~~~ ry0ohki Didn't realize this was a Pittsburgh area company, are you involved with any of the tech groups in the area? Also, you have my respect if you can pull off something non-standard within the state, I've found PA to be a real PITA to deal with compared to say Maryland or especially Delaware. ~~~ whit537 I'm a regular at PghPy (meeting tomorrow night! :-) and I spoke at PghTechFest last month. You? ~~~ ry0ohki More involved with the startup/AlphaLab community then the specific tech groups (going to the RubyConf though), I'm sure we'll cross paths at some point! ~~~ whit537 Ah! Wish I had caught wind of RubyConf. Looks great. Oh well, next year. :^) ------ WiseWeasel How is this different from most open source projects? Because it's a registered LLC? Because they have public policies enforcing transparency? Failing to pay your "employees" combined with an onerous set of requirements for them seems like a non-starter at worst, and unsustainable at best, since it takes all the fun out of volunteering. If I'm being held accountable and even liable for my involvement, I should be getting compensated for it. This just seems like the worst parts of corporate employment and open source projects mixed together for some reason; all the fun of filling out TPS reports, for none of the pay or benefits. ~~~ whit537 From the post: "An open company differs from an open source project in that an open company is a formal legal entity, and needn’t be about software." The set of employees of an open company is much, much smaller than the set of people working on whatever-it-is that the open company nominally "owns"-- really it's a commons. The only reason to have employees at all is to formalize access to private data such as passwords and private user data. Gittip, for example, has one employee, me. If you counted up everyone who has weighed in on GitHub we'd have maybe 20 or 30 community participants by now? Many more depending on how you draw the lines. If I understand you right, the "requirements" would apply to the small set of people with access to private data, not to the majority participating in building whatever-it-is together. ~~~ mmahemoff Wouldn't this be pretty much like MediaWiki, prior to it having paid employees, or other non-profit foundations? I'm actually not clear why this is a company instead of a non-profit foundation. It says: "An open company differs from a non-profit organization in that an open company does not itself accept donations, and it does not compensate its employees. From the open company’s point of view, whether and how its employees receive money and for what, is undefined." A non-profit can also not accept donations and not compensate employees, so the only thing that differs might be how employees receive money, which I don't really understand here. ~~~ whit537 Probably yes re: early MediaWiki. It's not a non-profit because it's not registered as such with a government. ------ loceng I feel this is how all charities should be run. ~~~ ReadEvalPost I'm with you on transparency, but I don't know how you expect charities to survive without paid employees. ~~~ lowmagnet I'd guess through volunteer time, as a lot of charities are run on the ground. Anything to reduce overhead cost. ~~~ cbr This is a false bargain. Spending money on overhead can make the money the charity spends on its program go much further. [http://blog.givewell.org/2007/01/16/which-of-these-boasts- is...](http://blog.givewell.org/2007/01/16/which-of-these-boasts-is-not-like- the-others/) [http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/06/09/why-ranking- charities...](http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/06/09/why-ranking-charities-by- administrative-expenses-is-a-bad-idea/) ------ drone Functional questions: 1) If all products are priced at-cost, and no employees are paid, is that to be assumed there will be no products sold that aren't at least, in part, developed using third parties? 2) If everything is priced at exactly their cost, what costs are factored in to pricing? Do you factor sunk cost, or only COGS? 2.a) If everything is priced at cost, and there is no added price for value, do you expect that every product will sell past its sunk and production costs? If not, who covers the loss when a product doesn't sell enough to meet its cost of production. (For example, some products require a minimum quantity to purchase/build before they are priced at a point the market will accept, to achieve pure cost parity without loss, you'd have to sell every unit in the same fiscal year.) 2.b) If 2.a can be accepted as some products will fail to meet their objectives, who makes up the difference? I.E. who put their money up-front to manufacture the products, and absorbs the loss? ~~~ whit537 1) Afaict everyone depends on third parties. Even if I pick wild blackberries, where do I get the containers to put them in? 2) Sunk cost. The intention is to factor out wages and profit. 2.a) Maybe use Kickstarter here? 2.b) The community of people who want the product. ------ zende The open discussion on company decisions is the most open part to me (<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues>). That's more significant than releasing the source. ------ speg Either my monitor is broken, or that is very light text on a white background... ~~~ fusiongyro Completely unreadable for me in RHEL 5.7 + FF 7.0.11, even at 300% magnification. ~~~ whit537 I've added this to the ticket: <https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/140> ------ pfraze How will you solve the issue of fair pay among employees? Isn't it likely that public awareness and popularity would determine who gets paid, regardless of who does the work? If this model is successful, and people begin to see whit537 as a kind of celebrity (like notch or moot) then how would the other employees work their way into the revenue stream? ~~~ whit537 This is an important open question. Some thinking here: <https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/27> ~~~ pfraze Cool, thanks. I appreciate the work you're doing here; hope it goes well. ------ dinkumthinkum I had a lot of things to say but now I just have the one question. What's so wrong with making money? I'm really interested. I think a lot of outsiders to our industry would be surprised to know how rampant to anti-money view is or at least against anything other than earning a very modest, and very simple living. ~~~ whit537 Nothing's wrong with making money? I'm currently looking for $2,000.00 per week myself: <https://www.gittip.com/whit537/> ;^) ------ ethanpil What incentive do employees have to work for free? Why are you not calling yourself a non-profit? ~~~ whit537 The incentive is the same as open source programmers have to work for free. RE: non-profits ... from the post: "An open company differs from a non-profit organization in that an open company does not itself accept donations, and it does not compensate its employees. From the open company’s point of view, whether and how its employees receive money and for what, is undefined." ~~~ DASD Since when are non-profits required to accept donations or even have employees? ~~~ whit537 De jure, they're not. De facto, they do. No? ~~~ DASD No. Please look up the idea of a private non-profit. There are quite a few around. ~~~ whit537 Is this what you mean? "Non-profit organizations typically fall into one of two categories: public and private. While a public non-profit organization receives the majority of its funding from the general public, a private non-profit organization receives most of its funds from only a few private sources, such as through donations from a single family or corporation." [http://smallbusiness.chron.com/difference-between-public- pri...](http://smallbusiness.chron.com/difference-between-public-private- nonprofit-organizations-26366.html) Still accepts donations. Still probably has a staff. Do you have a better link to what you're talking about? ~~~ DASD With regard to the source you cited, "such as" is not a blanket translation equivalent to "still accepts donations." As a single example, a foundation can be created with a one time funding and a foundation can also receive investment income. A non-profit can also consist entirely of only a Board of Directors. Whether you consider the Board as a staff is open to interpretation. You mentioned in an off-topic comment here in the discussion about being in the Pittsburgh area. May I suggest contacting the Pittsburgh Community Foundation who might be able to share more information with you? They should be able to tell you with more clarity and reference as to why some non-profits are not able to receive donations and are possibly not members of their "community." There are several hundred Community Foundations around the country if Pittsburgh is not accessible to you. ~~~ whit537 When I search on Google for "Pittsburgh Community Foundation" the closest I find is "The Pittsburgh Foundation": <http://pittsburghfoundation.org/> Is that who you are referring to? They do claim to be a community foundation.[0] However, I'm confused, because they also claim to be "a tax- exempt public charity" and that "donors are central to our mission"[0]. They also have a staff.[1] I'm having a hard time understanding your point, I guess. \---- [0] <http://pittsburghfoundation.org/node/207> [1] <http://pittsburghfoundation.org/staff_aboutUs> ~~~ DASD tldr: The Pittsburgh Community Foundation is a great reference to contact who can explain why some non-profits don't accept donations. Yes, that is the organization and your points are spot-on. My point was not about the structure of Pittsburgh Foundation but rather related to part of their purpose. In this particular example, a non-profit may be part of the geographical Pittsburgh community but is not necessarily a member(participant might be a more appropriate word) of the Pittsburgh Foundation "community" which receive donations/grants through them. So why would a non-profit not be a "community member?" Go back to my previous post: They should be able to tell you with more clarity and reference as to why some non-profits are not able to (added: or elect not to) receive donations and are possibly not members of their "community." ~~~ whit537 I think you're making a distinction between donations to an operating fund and donations to an endowment fund. The Pittsburgh Foundation (and presumably community foundations in general) do accept donations, but they focus on endowment funds. Am I hearing you correctly? ~~~ DASD The Pittsburgh Foundation handles both grants and endowment funds. Due to their presumed expertise in all things non-profit related, the Pittsburgh Foundation should be familiar with the basic categorization of non-profits as either private or public. You commented that the "De facto" non-profit does accept donations. I proffered that the Pittsburgh Foundation is a voice of reason in your own backyward and they would be happy to point out that this is not really the case. It is up to you to pursue that. I do have some other concern which is why is your ethos/structure is posted on a blog and not a more permanent page? If this is to be a working document then please annotate changes or if your intention is a truly "open" company then how about enlisting feedback from potential users some of whom might be lawers or accountants familiar with small business law and also interested in alternative business structures? If mmahemoff's quote (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287308>) is direct from your page, it shows a revision from what is currently shown and from what I'm going to presume is the original blog post from Google cache. Quoted in comment from mmahemoff: "An open company differs from a non-profit organization in that an open company does not itself accept donations, and it does not compensate its employees. From the open company’s point of view, whether and how its employees receive money and for what, is undefined." Current blog display: An open company differs from a non-profit organization in that an open company is not registered as a charity with a government, and does not itself accept donations. An open company also does not have a paid staff, as most non-profits do in practice. From the open company’s point of view, whether and how its employees receive money and for what, is undefined. Google Cache ([http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RwFZLSt...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RwFZLStUbSgJ:blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)): An open company differs from a non-profit organization in that it does not itself accept donations, and it does not compensate its employees. From the open company’s point of view, whether and how its employees receive money and for what, is undefined. With all of that said, I really like what you're doing here. I just am not able to see how this would be better than a well-documented non-profit or a B Corporation. But I am open to being convinced if there really is a better way to do things. If you want a real challenge and a start-up idea, I'd love to see you tackle a better non-profit transparency mechanism than we have available today with GuideStar and Charity Navigator. ------ potomak I'm trying to do the same with <http://tomato.es> ------ chatmasta Hellloooo communism. ~~~ whit537 Exactly. You can expect my secret police to visit you tonight. ;-) ------ thomasknoll "why?" ~~~ terryk88a to pull one's chain, to see what kind of reaction he'd get from whatever suckers and chumps he can fool with this BS or he really believes this BS and has narcissistic personality disorder ~~~ whit537 You have conclusively exhausted the possibilities.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
With an official description, Google Drive is more real than ever - froo http://venturebeat.com/2009/01/30/with-an-official-description-google-drive-is-more-real-than-ever/ ====== eli I think this is the most clear-cut case of people getting excited about a product _solely_ because the brand name is Google. Online file storage is boring. Dropbox is free and works really, really well. ~~~ froo Sound's like someone hasn't been keeping up with the GDrive rumours. From what is being suggested, is that Google will be giving people the equivalent of dropbox's premium services... for free. I think dropbox is great, I have a free account and use it all the time, I'd like to get a premium account if my needs ever get to that point - but if Google can provide significantly more space + their brand recognition, it's going to be hard to compete with. ------ shimi DropBox are excellent. But I'll move to Google the moment they will provide the service because I'm using Android (Assuming that an Android client will be coming out) ------ DenisM In the mean time one can use <http://www.jungledisk.com/> it keeps stuff in S3, looks like a local disk drive, client-side encryption, standard amazon s3 rates + $20 for software itself. You can also give your key to their middle-tier server and have web access to your files. ------ foobar2k I love dropbox, but if google release basically the same thing, how are dropbox going to survive? ~~~ unalone I would suspect that Dropbox has a pretty fanatic group of fans out there. I'm one: Dropbox saved my ass when Boot Camp wrecked my hard drive. 7 years of documents were all saved, even though I'd deleted them from Dropbox previously. That's an _incredible_ service. I recommend it to everybody who needs a good way to store stuff online, or share stuff. Google isn't omnipotent. Orkut was a terrible social network because they just didn't _get_ what to do. I'd guess same goes with that animated world they made that just recently closed. While they're powerful, it's really hard to beat out a truly stellar product, and Dropbox is one of the best I've seen. ~~~ nickb It's hard to compete with free. Google can afford to undercut Dropbox. ~~~ run4yourlives Many people view free as a reason not to use a service. Clearly, if I was going to use the service as disaster recovery, I'd pay for dropbox. (I use dropbox for free right now) ~~~ nickb Google's services are synonymous with free. I don't see many people freaked out by it. Competing with Google is like competing with MS in '90s... a really hard proposition. ~~~ run4yourlives _I don't see many people freaked out by it._ Depends on your circle really. For personal stuff, I make full use of google. However for anything business related my leash of trust would be a lot shorter. I'd feel much more comfortable to pay for a service that gives me someone to blame/sue should the response to a disaster be less than adequate. You really just don't get this with google. ------ charlesju Google just needs to acquire Dropbox and scale them out.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Img/loading-related jQuery plugin I posted as a comment on some blog... - soundphed http://engineeredweb.com/blog/09/12/preloading-images-jquery-and-javascript#comment-92 ====== soundphed I don't have my own blog and I'm not sure of the etiquette here. I've been using this jQuery plugin I wrote for awhile now and am just curious what other people think/if they find it useful...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Pixelapse (YC W12): GitHub-Style Sharing and Version Control For Design Projects - lominming http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/13/yc-backed-pixelapse-brings-github-style-sharing-version-control-to-your-design-projects/ ====== cantlin There's tremendous value in the history of a design file. Virtually every design agency I've worked for has had the need to write case studies based on work they've done. "Showing your workings" is also a powerful tool for demonstrating to clients the value for money they're getting. Finally, I can imagine such history being an invaluable aid for junior designers trying to learn from their seniors; it potentially transforms a nebulous process that is very hard to inspect (except by direct observation) into one that can be widely examined by distributed users. What I'm unclear on is how the nitty gritty of the versioning actually operates. For example, most designers would attest to heading down many "dead ends" that may only ever live in RAM. Can services like this snapshot those interim states, or do they only capture changes to files on disc? Some experienced designers will also likely do their own primitive versioning by saving a design out to different paths as they go (home_v1.psd, home_v2.psd...). Can Pixelapse et al handle this user behaviour, or does it require people to change their workflow? If the latter, is an analogous feature available to allow designers to mark major version increments? In many ways it ultimately feels that "files in folders" is a broken way to handle designs, units of design and design projects on a computer. I applaud attempts to supersede it. As long as Photoshop thinks in terms of files though, it will be a difficult space to innovate. ~~~ JangoSteve We just recently started using Pixelapse a week and a half ago, so I can answer a couple of these. There is an app that runs in the menu bar of our designer Kevin's mac, which automatically uploads "revisions" of the design he's working on. It only captures changes to the file on disk, so he has to save strategically knowing that it will create a "revision". I personally don't like this, as it discourages saving often. To be fair, you can mark different revisions as "milestones", but this just seems like a bandaid for this particular problem. Before using Pixelapse, Kevin had his own workflow (similar to what you mentioned), where he'd save different versions of a design as project_homepage_option1.jpg, project_homepage_option2.jpg, etc. Pixelapse absolutely does not support this. It will upload each one as a different file and offers no way to combine them so that you can compare them for review (and there is no way in Pixelapse to compare different files, only different revisions of the same file. Also keep in mind that Pixelapse, along with every other similar app I looked at, uses the revision/history paradigm for comparing designs. But I think Pixelapse at least allows for the non-timeline-based approach a bit better than others, though it still didn't quite fit our workflow without some changes to our workflow. _Edited to clarify, I wasn't trying to be too critical of Pixelapse. I actually really like it, it just required some changes to our workflow to be effective, and I think we're still trying to figure a couple things out._ ~~~ cantlin Thanks Steve, interesting stuff. It feels like revision-on-save is a significant limitation; I wonder if they have plans to tackle this in future. ------ aviswanathan I'm curious to see how the whole 'forking/cloning' concept is replicated here, especially if Pixelapse is seeking to become the Github for design. I'm fairly certain that the restrictions for use of graphic content in a public format is a lot more prohibitive as opposed to software (there's not really such a thing as 'open-source graphics' besides measly clip art galleries). The true social value of Github is in its community-oriented approach where any developer anywhere can fork code and contribute changes. That doesn't seem as possible with imagery, and my impression is that designers are more concerned with protecting their work (nothing wrong with that - just an observation). ~~~ JangoSteve We recently started using Pixelapse (we're a development team that just welcomed our first full-time graphic designer a few months ago). It's pretty nice, but there is one huge difference between design and development that makes the idea of "Github for design" seem like the wrong idea. Developers really only need to share code with other developers. There's almost no such thing as a passive receiver of code. The ability to easily collaborate on code with other developers and within a team, via cloning, forking, pushing and pulling, makes Github (and Bitbucket and Gitlab, etc) immensely beneficial. Design interactions, on the other hand, tend to be made up primarily of designers sharing designs with non-designers, whether it be the client for feedback or the technical team for implementation (or the printers, or the marketing department). I think Pixelapse is more like the "Github for design" if you just think of Github as a 3rd-party repository for easy version tracking and uploading of code, and which makes it easy for others to comment and compare different versions of the code. In other words, minus the forking and cloning concept. At least, that's how we use it. ------ jeffreylo How does this compare to Layervault? ~~~ thekevinjones There is a Quora question for this well, where more (helpful) comparison information might be posted in the future. [http://www.quora.com/Design/How-do-LayerVault-and- Pixelapse-...](http://www.quora.com/Design/How-do-LayerVault-and-Pixelapse- compare) ~~~ goronbjorn This particular Quora answer does not reflect highly on the LayerVault folks–it makes a lot of ad hominem attacks and comes off as immature. ------ JacksonGariety Why not just link directly to the Pixelapse website? Does TechCrunch deserve to be a middle man for every startup? ~~~ scoot Why not indeed: <https://www.pixelapse.com/> \- especially since TechCrunch have a broken link, and pixelapse haven't thought to redirect it. ~~~ shravan Just caught that - it should redirect now. ------ justjimmy One habit I developed was save often - meaning saving when it's not really at a version state yet. Why? Cause PS crashes every so often. So when I'm saving for a version, I save it as a separate file. The problem with detecting a save and treating that as a version, is going to net a me a ton of versions that I will not need. There should be a plugin that has a shortcut key within PS and lets me save it as a version _when_ I dictate it and not every time time I hit Cmd+S. Cause when I Cmd+S != new version. I've been told to learn Layer Comp in CS6. Apparently it's Adobe's new feature to version control. ------ KaoruAoiShiho Isn't github's billion dollar valuation based on the premise that they can become the "social versioning / forking for everything". Better get moving quickly github, the competitors are coming. ~~~ teamonkey Git's strength is with source control and it sucks at dealing with image/music/video/binary data. It's OK for a basic few assets that rarely change, but it takes effort to make it work properly. Consider the problem of people trying to work on the same image file at the same time. An easy/naive solution for most version control software is to stop multiple people from editing the same file at once, but AFAIK this is impractical in git; the antithesis even. Others might do something complex like allow different people to edit different layers of the same photoshop doc and try to merge them. There are version control solutions such as Alienbrain and even Perforce that are much more efficient at handling assets out of the box. ------ stcredzero Programmers have been struggling with version control for decades now. There's a lot of power and value in the way we do things, which is effectively placed out of the reach of non-programmers by UI issues. (And to be fair, a lot of that power needs to be hidden!) It seems that Pixelapse isn't quite going this route. If Github can compete, they would have the advantage of easier integration between designer oriented data and program code. ------ hannahmitt The largest plan has 9 collaborators, which seems rather prohibitive. As a dev I often had to tweak my designer's assets. For example, fixing the 9-patching for Android or removing bad whitespace. Could I offer these changes in a pull request? ~~~ shravan Hi hannah, We'll work with you if you have larger needs. Please get in touch: hello@pixelapse.com With regards to changes made to assets, they sync automatically between your machine and your designer's. ------ demian Version Control is a concepts that every dicipline, that needs to manage documents, should try to implement.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why this 63-year-old teacher ditched the US to retire in the highlands of Panama - xivzgrev https://www.marketwatch.com/story/it-is-an-act-of-insanity-to-stay-in-the-us-why-this-63-year-old-teacher-ditched-massachusetts-to-retire-in-the-highlands-of-panama-2019-08-23 ====== adonnjohn It certainly doesn't strike as a surprise that an American teacher would hit her breaking point with the system and venture elsewhere. Teachers have largely lost control of the autonomy required to do their jobs successfully. There's more and more paperwork every year, and both parents and public admin seem less satisfied with the output on their pupils in the process. Seems like a recipe for disaster: a recurring loop of deterioration.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google Cloud shell Command injection - cujanovic http://www.pranav-venkat.com/2016/03/command-injection-which-got-me-6000.html ====== samuellb Mobile version that doesn't require Javascript: [http://www.pranav- venkat.com/2016/03/command-injection-which...](http://www.pranav- venkat.com/2016/03/command-injection-which-got-me-6000.html?m=1)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Waveboard: Google Wave Client for Mac and iPhone is Coming - holoohapter http://mashable.com/2009/10/19/waveboard/ ====== cpr Not a real client on the Mac. Just a Fluid-like (Fluid-based?) wrapper app. Don't know about the iPhone. The real test of Wave's openness is going to be whether a client can realistically be built by a third party. Right now some people on the semi-public Wave server are discussing defining the client/server protocol, claiming that Google is open to such a third-party definition. I'm very skeptical that Google is actually open to such an approach. It sounds more like rampant, uninformed speculation. (What's running right now at Google is just the same Java-based, protobuf- based communications code on both the server and client, with a GWT version on the client.)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Install Android 2.2 on a jailbroken iPhone over the air - hardik http://mobiputing.com/2010/11/how-to-install-android-2-2-on-a-jailbroken-iphone/ ====== kevinelliott I've been helping with iDroid and Bootlace, and I can tell you that a lot has progressed over the last couple of months. Power management has been a huge priority, and while some of it is there now, much more is to come. Also, it runs incredibly slowly on a 2G, but quite reasonable on a 3G, and absolutely awesome on a 3GS. In fact it feels faster on a 3GS than on a real droid phone. Part of the reason that it runs hot is the screen power management is incomplete, so it's always on, albeit dimmed. This should change soon. ~~~ Xuzz It doesn't even run on the iPhone 3GS? Also, the iPhone 2G and 3G have identical processors, so I'm not seeing where a speed difference would come from... ~~~ nextparadigms First 2 iPhone generations had a 600 Mhz ARM 11 CPU but they only ran at 400 Mhz. iPhone 3GS was about twice as fast with a much better Cortex A8 CPU and a 600 MHz clock. Besides he said it's working even faster on iPhone 3GS than on a Droid 1 (same CPU and clock). Did you even read the comment? ~~~ Xuzz Did you even read my comment? :( I've read the code, there is no iPhone 3GS support -- yet. Here's a link to the project's wiki, note all the red under 3GS: <http://www.idroidproject.org/wiki/Status#iDroid_7> Secondly, my point was about the iPhone 2G vs 3G (not 3GS), in reply t "it runs incredibly slowly on a 2G, but quite reasonable on a 3G". They -- as you said -- have the exact same processor, so it can't really run very different on one or the other. (In fact, I have it on both right in front of me, it seems about the same running iDroid.) Could someone explain the downvotes? ------ shimon FYI: if you install this, boot into iDroid, and can't figure out how to reboot: The power button is simulated by holding the iPhone's home and lock buttons simultaneously. ------ timmorgan Anyone know how well this works, I mean for real -- not just as something to play with? Last video I saw of Android running on iPhone seemed very buggy and sloooow. ~~~ spitfire A friend tried it on his 2g iphone and got 15 minutes battery life. Useful as a proof of concept. or as engineering work in progress, but not as a phone. ------ ableal Personally, I've been occasionally watching the efforts to put Android on the HTC HD2 (WinMo 6.5, left behind for 7). Seems to be going well, with reasonable battery life, etc. although not "over the air" install. Look up the XDA developers forums. ------ hasenj nice, hopefully now I can try the 8pen thing ------ gcb Why every video on youtube is with 2g or 3g? not a single 3gs so far	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Is That Really a Cappuccino? - zabramow http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/fashion/mens-style/is-that-cappuccino-youre-drinking-really-a-cappuccino.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur ====== lisper I made a brief foray into coffee snobbery about three years ago. I quickly got lost in all the permutations of espresso machines, grinders, roasters, beans, etc. and so I decided I should get myself a baseline of what a "proper" espresso should taste like. Fortunately, at the place I worked at the time we had a (supposedly) top-of-the-line espresso machine and several resident coffee geeks, including one who was actually from Italy. I asked their advice and obtained a bag of what were supposedly the best beans in town, and brought them in to the office. To make a long story short, several hours and I don't know how many batches of espresso later, none of us had managed to make even a single cup that was remotely close to being drinkable. So I got a $100 Keurig machine, and never looked back. Still, when I'm in Italy, I can go to any coffee shop and get an espresso that is absolutely delicious. So the Italians definitely know something I don't. ~~~ Schwolop Grind, pressure, volume. Keep two of those constant and you can tune the third. It's really not as hard as coffee snobs pretend it is. ~~~ archinal I believe that water temperature is extremely important as well. ~~~ Schwolop Sure - but the OP said they had a top-of-the-line espresso machine, so I took that as a given. Similarly, fresh beans are vital, but the OP said he/she had just bought them. ~~~ lisper That's right. I went to the particular store and bought the particular ridiculously expensive beans recommended by the coffee geeks. We did the experiment the next day. There are _at least_ six degrees of freedom: grind, pressure, volume, water temp, beans, and roast. That's a lot of possible combinations. And my whole point was that despite making my best effort to control all six of them, the coffee still didn't come out good. Not just not good, but actually terrible. Undrinkable. No one could figure out what was going wrong. What I do know is that I can get consistently good coffee out of my Keurig, and consistently awesomely great coffee in Italy, but nearly nowhere else in the world (and I've been to a lot of places). So it must be possible to control the process. The Italians can't just be getting lucky. But I have no idea what the magic formula is. Maybe it's the water. (Oh no! A seventh degree of freedom!) ------ mc32 Has it gotten that bad that we care about what coffee dispensers and drinkers believe to be a true cappuccino or not? Not for nothing, but this frothy fluff. Who cares, serve what you like and drink what you like, but please don't make it out to be anything more than superficial preference. ~~~ kbatten My espresso machine was one of the best purchases I have made. I can have straight espresso or any variation of frothed milk and coffee that I can imagine. I use store brand coffee and milk and it is delicious. Its worth investing in if you care about it and I drink coffee almost every day, so something I think is worth investing in. ~~~ jpittis Which espresso machine did you purchase? Does anyone know if getting an inexpensive one is somehow bad? ~~~ mkching If you're looking to make espresso drinks, going too cheap will be an exercise in frustration. Cheaper machines have limitations you need to work around and make it harder to get consistent results. Most people just getting started will simply give up. If your budget is less than $500, get a Nespresso. It makes a better drink than the other pod systems and beats most non-specialty shops (it can't touch a good shop or something you can make with a good machine and practice). If you want to go further than this, the following combinations provide a very good value: Gaggia Classic + Breville Smart Grinder Pro (~$500 total) The Gaggia Classic is considered entry level to make good espresso by many people. I started with this and it can make a good drink, but you cannot make back to back drinks and foaming milk well is more difficult than on pricier machines. Breville Dual Boiler + Barazta Vario (~$2000 total) After using the above setup for a while, I upgraded to this combination. It is considered one of the best values if this is your price range. Frothing milk well is much easier than on the Gaggia Classic, and its larger boiler and electronic controller provide better temperature stability. If you want something halfway between a semi-automatic and a fully automatic, the Breville Oracle has received very positive reviews in the coffee community, even by people who came in wanting to hate the level of automation it can bring. Don't skimp on the grinder, get very fresh beans from a specialty roaster, and then plan a week or two learning curve. If you're interested, [http://www.home-barista.com/forums/](http://www.home-barista.com/forums/) has a lot of information. ~~~ lobster_johnson Regarding milk, in my opinion no consumer machine will give you enough steam pressure to create good microfoam. There are electric milk frothers from Breville and Nespresso that rotate a metal frother to run air through the milk. The result is sort of microfoamy (but usually more like soap-foamy), but doesn't have the particular flavour that you get from steamed milk. I'm (notoriously, among my friends, and probably obnoxiously too) finicky about milk froth quality, and the best solution I have found is a stovetop frother. You have to heat the milk to the right temperature (the steam wand actually works great for this), and then use the plunger for 10-15 seconds. Weirdly enough, the result is almost perfect microfoam. This one is great: [http://www.amazon.com/HIC-Stainless-Steel- Frother-14-Ounce/d...](http://www.amazon.com/HIC-Stainless-Steel- Frother-14-Ounce/dp/B000X7GF40) ------ tesseract A proper cappuccino is 2 parts gin to 1 part vermouth... hang on, that's a martini. ~~~ dagw Surely you mean 12:1 2:1 is the ratio for a gin and tonic :) ------ switch007 In the UK, a cappucino has cocoa sprinkled on top. Except for "artisan" coffee shops, that's the biggest difference to a cafe latte. Basically if you want a small, strong, milky coffee from any of the big chains (e.g. Costa, Starbucks, Nero) you need to order a flat white; and probably pay more for it. ~~~ tomlock Same in Australia. ------ toolslive I'm going to get flagged for this, but there are plenty of recipes named incorrectly in the US. Just ask for a pepperoni pizza in Italy, and see what you get. ~~~ srean Or imagine the surprise if ordering a "Latte" gets you a glass of milk. ------ tomlock >>The new enthusiasm for the flat white, a drink made of espresso and milk that seems to have originated in Australia or New Zealand, is particularly nettlesome to Mr. Nye. “You put 10 people in a room who claim to be an authority on the flat white, you’re going to get at least five different opinions on what it should be,” he said. “People are trying to make the whole process intimidating to the consumer.” What the bloody hell is this drongo talking about? Flat whites are the most average drink in Australia. Flat whites in Australia intimidate no-one. We're intimidated by single origin long blacks and cold drip. ~~~ amatix Getting a flat white in the UK is truly painful (as a recently emigrated NZer) ~~~ DanBC Coffee places in the UK often get the milk wrong, so most drinks are going to be painful. If you go to a big chain there's more chance they've had training in steaming the milk properly. But then you have to put up with their roast (starbucks) or lack of wifi (costa). And even then some of them are real branches (had all the training) and others are franchised branches (use the branding but have different prices and far less training). But a bad coffee from a chain is still going to be very much better than the instant you'll be offered in many places. ------ uhwhat It seems like most coffee shops (..that I've tried along the pacific coast) have no idea how to pull an espresso shot and will instead just brew a very bad strong shot of coffee. Ordering a cappuccino has generally been interpreted as a pile of light milk bubbles on top of "less milk than the normal latte". ------ gaspar On the one hand food in US is just amazing, because you have so many options (I miss though my home country's food and ingredients). On the other hand though, coffee here is just so so bad and I don't understand why. ------ jpittis When going to a coffee shop and ordering an espresso and frothed milk, most prefer a certain texture and taste. It would be useful to have an agreed upon language to describe this preference. The current language we use seems to have very inconsistent results.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Greener pastures? A tale of the Minnesota startup that was - johns http://tech.mn/news/2010/07/14/greener-pastures-a-tale-of-the-minnesota-startup-that-was/ ====== CitizenKane As a former Minnesotan I can say that it goes beyond taxes. The culture in Minnesota is very risk averse and if you're starting a software company finding able software developers is very difficult. Because of that culture, finding funding is very difficult as well which pretty much confines the field of potential startups mostly to ones that can be bootstrapped. It's a shame because there is a pretty vibrant tech community in the Twin Cities. But it leans very heavily to contracting and consulting. I'd suggest going elsewhere to start a company and moving to Minnesota when you're ready to raise a family. ~~~ johns This is exactly my experience in the Twin Cities as well. Having recently moved to Boulder for spousal career support, I can't even really describe how different the mindset is here. It's not even close to the same. ~~~ delano As? ------ ryanricard As a lover of the Twin Cities, this is definitely a saddening read. Minnesota is a pretty great place to work in tech as an employee, but it's not currently the thriving area of tech innovation I'd love to see it become. It's too bad, too, since in theory the Twin Cities has a lot going for it for startups: lower cost of living, highly educated workforce, and theres nothing like a long, bitter, winter to justify long periods of time spent indoors hacking ;). Obviously there's no simple button-press solution for a city to become a startup capitol, or else every city would have pressed that button by now, but I do think that the focus on Corporate Tax rates is particularly wrongheaded. Just about every survey of "Business-Friendly Tax Rates" tends to put CA, MA, and NY near the bottom, surely a higher tax rate can't be _that_ discouraging to potential startups? ~~~ protomyth It can if there is no historical technology culture. MN is in a bad spot because it has high taxes and no history. Plus, the government (both state and local) really don't care about technology startups. Heck, most of the large IT shops in the area are run by people who don't want tech startups because that would increase their costs. They already recruit from around the area (Iowa and ND) for tech to keep the price down. ~~~ mml mn has plenty of history (you may have heard of youtube, or unisys, or cray), and a good number of entrepreneurs. just no angels. angels can go to hell imho. i'll bootstrap thanks. ~~~ johns One of the YouTube founders having loose ties to MN does not make it a MN startup. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawed_Karim> ------ tednaleid The healthcare startup scene in MN is actually pretty vibrant, but other sectors aren't quite as strong. I've been involved in a number of healthcare start-ups in the Twin Cities over the years, including my current VC-backed one, Bloom Health (<http://gobloomhealth.com>). There's quite a bit of startup work to be found if you look around. It isn't as barren as some would have you believe. ------ txgleton Welcome to Austin! Not only taxes are lower here, but the city has a real downtown, tons of interesting and educated people, great outdoor activities and a nice dating scene. I can't think of a more balanced place to start a company. The only drawback is lack of VCs in the area. Austin Ventures are the only girl in town and they tend to favor "seasonal CEOs" over young engineers and are extremely conservative with their investments. ~~~ melito Austin is a great town with a lot of great people and it's a lot of fun, but... I was absolutely miserable living here. If you're young, you should head to one of the coasts. That's my opinion. Austin would be great if I was older and in a position to buy a house/ start a family / etc ~~~ aliston Why so down on Austin? I've heard really good things about the nightlife scene and other things young folks would enjoy... do tell! ~~~ melito I love Austin. I think it's an awesome city. Right place at the wrong time I suppose. Just wasn't happy while I was there. ------ aaronbrethorst I bailed on Minnesota for Washington state almost as soon as I received my Computer Science degree. Seattle may not have the best tech scene or startup community in the US, but it's a far sight better than what I've seen in the Midwest. It's really a pity, too. There's some great stuff in the Twin Cities, and I think it would be well served with more diversification in availability of high tech jobs. From what I can tell, unless you're into doing ERP/CRM consulting, EE for 3M, IT work for Target Corp, or biomedical engineering, you're pretty well SOL. ------ nswanberg For those in the Minneapolis area that want to discuss Minnesota's startup potential or exchange tips on moving to Boulder or the Valley, or other HN- related topics, here's tonight's meetup details (6pm at the 5-8 Club): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1514455> ------ protomyth On radio in the Twin Cities, you continually hear advertising for companies to move to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The Tax Foundation rates SD #1 and MN #43 in their State Business Tax Climate Index. Texas is rated #11, and I am pretty sure it is not hyperbole that if all their MN staff moved to TX they could hire another developer. ~~~ ryanricard That Tax Foundation survey would seem to suggest that CA (48), NY(49), and MA (36) aren't good places to start a startup either. <http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp59_es.pdf> I think that the other factors mentioned in the article: innovative incentives for investors, locality to VCs and experienced (successful) startups, and a great community of developers all factor in more heavily than tax policy. ~~~ ianb It would also be wrong to think that lowering taxes would change something dramatically; . The Dakotas were in bad shape economically and could sacrifice existing tax revenue and responsible fiscal oversight (remembering a lot of what they attracted was financial industry drawn to low regulation and low consumer protections -- thanks a lot Dakotas!) Minnesota's economy is going relatively well, and there's no dearth of successful companies. And generally there's a good standard of living and a strong sense of community responsibility, which is why those companies are staying -- there's real people behind any decision to move, and a lot of people aren't willing to move even if there might be financial incentives. Minnesota is missing tech entrepreneurship... well, even that isn't true, as medical technology is doing quite well. Y Combinator style startups aren't. This is unfortunate, but overall changes to the economic structure of the state is hardly called for. ~~~ protomyth uhm.. North Dakota is doing fine fiscally (budget surplus) and has a lot of money coming in from oil. Perhaps you are referring to South Dakota which is home to a lot of credit card companies? Minnesota is running the 10th worst budget deficit (14.7% of state's general fund). ~~~ ianb Yes, I'm referring to those states (at least I believe it's both North and South Dakota, though maybe it's only the South?) being lax on financial regulation of companies. ~~~ protomyth I'm pretty sure its only SD, they have all the credit card companies. ND has its own bank though. ------ seldo People are moving their startups from Minnesota to the _Dakotas_? Does your startup need hundreds of square miles of empty land? ~~~ grellas Hey, I grew up in the Dakotas many years ago - it is not empty land but _flat_ land with lots of ten-foot-high snow drifts through most of the year. Just wanted to clarify. On a serious note, the people in the midwest are wonderful and it would be great if there were more opportunities to launch and build startups there. But you need to build a critical mass of entrepreneurs, investors, advisors, and resources that will nurture such startups and, without that, it will remain hit or miss for any given locale that supports only intermittent startup activity. The good news is that it is possible to launch from such places (where, even a decade ago, this would have been almost unthinkable). As this piece points out, though, it is not easy to sustain the company beyond the earliest phase without the connections and resources that will facilitate growth. ~~~ yesimahuman I wonder how MN compares to Wisconsin, specifically Madison. I feel like the modern tech/startup community here is growing (besides bio science which is the big thing here), but it is really hard to find talented programmers who are willing to work for a startup (despite there being plenty at the university). I don't know what it is exactly, but established companies seem to draw the most talent, despite the jobs being pretty mundane. I think the biggest problem is a lot of people don't believe in the possibilities of starting a company. The biggest thing I've learned from starting a company here is just how much support there is, and people who want to see you succeed. You never realize it until you take the first step and venture out. As for talent, I've learned to be patient. The right people _do_ come along if you wait. I've posted jobs several times and I get new applicants each time that restore my faith in the local community. Finding investors is pretty doable here from those around me that have received outside funding (my company is friends and family right now), and there is a noticeable interest from the government, the university, the community, and investors, in growing Madison to become a hub of innovation. Finally, one big thing I've noticed is how under served the community is with the whole web 2.0 thing (non techies don't have time for another website). People here really value a personal touch. Couple that with less local competition and there is a lot of opportunity here. ------ Hume62 I'm sure tax rates play a role, but think the bigger issue is the lack of depth and/or interest among angels/VCs for software start-ups in MN. Now, if you have a medical device start-up spinning out of Medtronic or the U of MN, that's another story... ------ rlyboslavsky _It helped through the learning curve and cut through red tape with connections. I mean, you can�t just walk up to a guy like Paul Buchheit or Joshua Schachter and have them take you seriously._ When I was reading it I thought "sure you can!" (I was thinking about me talking to Paul Bucheit at startup school in 08) but then I realized "oh, that event was actually organized by YC too! ) :) ------ joshu What? I take everything seriously. ~~~ lloydarmbrust Okay, that statement was incorrect--but I'm not sure how to phrase it. My point was that if we were still in Minnesota, there is a 0% chance that you or any of our awesome investors would have given us a chance. Being a part of YC gave us the chance to meet and interact with some of the greatest minds in the Valley. Our idea is essentially a unique approach to a sales model--it's hard to convince someone of that over e-mail. I do apologize for phrasing it incorrectly. ------ apower Does Minnesota have the laws that protect employees to keep their inventions done outside of work? ~~~ jcl According to the following article, not only is Minnesota one of the eight states with such laws, but it was actually the first: <http://www.orinlaney.com/ipguideweb.html#legislative> ------ nnash I was completely unaware of the law mentioned in the article. Minnesota is a great state, and I love living there its a shame that it seems I'd have to move if I ever wanted to create or join a startup. ------ bigsassy That's such a pity to hear. Duluth, MN is a GREAT town, but with only a handful of companies doing any real software development (web or otherwise) I'd imagine it would be pretty hard to get funding. I know Points North (<http://www.points-north.com/>) managed to obtain quite a bit of angel investment about 4 years ago. I guess Lloyd and Jason just didn't know the right people. Anyway, congrats on their success outside of the Northlands :) ------ mltsy I've never lived outside of the midwest, so I don't know enough about how Minnesota compares, but do I love living here. I plan on leaving to help make Seeing Interactive successful, which I'm not torn up about, but I hope to move back before too long. I say if there's anyone successful out there who loves MN, move your started up start-ups (aka companies) to MN and make it work. You too can be an angel some day :) The midwest is long overdue for a tech mecca. ------ kwhinnery Minnesota has several good, small software shops doing interesting work. Also plenty of active contributors (or founders) in prominent open source projects (JRuby guys live here, two Appcelerator employees, jQuery and Dojo committers and more, and this is just people I know personally). It's true, you don't hear of many VC or Angel funded start-ups around these parts. But we do have plenty of start up companies engineered to, you know, MAKE MONEY from day 1.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
To PGP/MIME or not to PGP/MIME - HerraBRE https://www.mailpile.is/blog/2014-11-21_To_PGP_MIME_Or_Not.html ====== darklajid I just started looking into PGP (well, gnupg to be honest). The plan is to both use gpg for communication/email, but also for backups (duplicity), secret stuff/passwords (pass) and authentication (ssh). For that I'm (not affiliated) using a yubikey neo¹ for now. Advantages: \- Very easy to set up (works for signing, encrypting, authentication already) \- Contains the key material on the 'smart card' In addition my main key is ~elsewhere~: After loading three subkeys on the yubikey I saved and removed my main key from the keychain. This _should_ solve the problem of the airgap in this article? A reasonable way to get access to your data/mail without giving access to your secret key? Things I am confused about/haven't thought through yet/reasons to not switch to use it completely yet: \- I'm confused about the key backup solutions here. Keys generated on the smart card cannot be backed up as far as I can see. I have a decent idea of how I'm going to handle my master key (both where and how I'll store it safely), but .. the rest is still not quite clear to me \- Mobile. So, if my day to day keys are on this smart card, I cannot read those mails on my mobile. Which .. might be a good thing when we talk about security, but a PITA for my day to day usage. No idea how or if I can solve this one But back to the article: If you're in the "whistle-blowers, activists, spies" category, is the airgap (physically) really required or would a smart card give you the same protection? And the >Mail clients implementing some sort of "Email Manifest protocol" could agree to move critical headers out of the main message and into the encrypted manifest as often as possible line seems overly optimistic in my opinion. Repeat after me: Microsoft Outlook. And .. the introduction is basically PGP/Mime doesn't work everywhere and/or needs plugins first (-> Bad user experience). Is a brand new proposal that wouldn't work anywhere for quite some time really the answer? 1: I got an older release, so no U2F for me, but this is - among other things - a 'smart card' ~~~ mike-cardwell > If you're in the "whistle-blowers, activists, spies" category, is the airgap > (physically) really required or would a smart card give you the same > protection? Smartcard doesn't protect you if your Internet facing machine is compromised. With a separate air gapped machine, you could print out the cipher text from the Internet connected machine, then scan it in/OCR it into the non-Internet connected machine and decrypt it there. Then you could encrypt a response on the non-Internet connected machine, read the cipher text back in to the Internet connected machine via scanning+OCR and send it out. ~~~ TheLoneWolfling ...Assuming your input stack on your non-internet connected machine is uncompromisable. In practice, this is decidedly not the case. OCR is complex. Your attack surface is not exactly tiny. ~~~ a1369209993 _Good_ OCR is complex. "Here's a jpeg with 80 lines of 80 characters (from a set of 64 ascii characters chosen for maximum descernability); do your best and I'll run that through a ECC that cuts down to a 32KB chunk." is rather less so. Also, there's no reason your OCR program needs any permissions other than reading a single jpeg and writing a single text file. ~~~ TheLoneWolfling You can make the same argument about a non-airgapped computer, though. I don't see any advantage of this over (say) it connected via a dead-simple serial connection. ------ diafygi This does make sense and is backwards compatible, though what about HTML messages? Will you add the simple to/from clutter to the top of the html content, too? Instead of trying to extend the standard, why not just nest an unencrypted email in an encrypted email? I'm thinking along the lines of: 1\. Someone writes their message into the client and attaches some files. 2\. The client generates an unencrypted, standard multi-part email message as message.eml. 3\. The client then pgp encrypts message.eml to message.eml.pgp. 4\. The client then generates a new email with message.eml.gpg as an attachment and sends it. 5\. The recipient receives the message and sees one attachment message.eml.gpg. Most native clients can open arbitrary .eml files as email messages. This makes it much more convenient to interact (reply/forward/etc.) with this technique, and it is also HTML message compatible. Also, if you have a PGP plugin for your native client, it would decrypt the attachment, and you could just double click it to open that message to read/reply/forward/etc. As far as web clients, most can't decrypt pgp messages so you'd have to download the message.eml.pgp. And I guess you'd also have to have something that can read .eml files. However, it should be fairly easy for pgp-enabled web clients like Mailpile to open these messages since they have to already have a message format parser. Anyway, thanks for the article! ~~~ HerraBRE Thanks for reading, and thanks for the feedback! HTML mail is certainly a problem - editing HTML in that way is not nearly as easily done (nor reversed) as plain text. This is a loose end in the current proposal. Like many techies, I'm somewhat guilty of wishing HTML mail would just go away... However, in all fairness, HTML mail is not often used with PGP today and is somewhat of a "luxury" item, not a critical part of how people communicate. I did consider embedding a full message/rfc822 part instead, and that is also what Werner (the GnuPG author) prefers as well. If PGP/MIME had been implemented that way in the first place, and clients had evolved with that in mind, I'd probably just be happily using that. Unfortunately, the way message/rfc2822 attachments are handled by current mail clients, is not nearly streamlined enough that I'd be happy making people jump through those hoops for every single message. I'm trying to find a sweet spot of working well enough with existing PGP-aware clients, better with PGP-unaware clients, and addressing the limitations of PGP/MIME at the same time. It's a bit of a balancing act and so far the easy/elegant solutions don't seem to pass muster when used in the real world. But I'd love to be proven wrong about that. ------ barnaby Good article. I wonder why Mailpile are targeting difficult use-cases such as activists, journalists, etc. It feels like every PGP provider aims for this, but OTR encryption tools aim for a much easier use case: average users who just want to hide their private conversations from big data algorithms which then sell their secrets publicly. OTR is much easier as a result, but it can't do email (that I know of). :-( In this article mailpile worry about users who need an airgap. What worries me is whether creating features for airgap users makes anti-features for users like me who just use PGP when mailing with my parents, my wife, and some friends. We just want to avoid our secrets being part of "Big Data" and as a side benefit we resist passive surveillance. Mailvelope (which is "easy") is complicated enough for my parents, they would never add the complexity of an airgap. We just want easy encryption, even if it isn't totally NSA-proof. ~~~ HerraBRE Fair question. :-) I mentioned those users as one group that was impacted, not as the be-all-end- all target audience. If you re-read the relevant section you'll see I spend more words worrying about Mailvelope and Google E2E users. They face the same issues. ------ brians Looks like a fine start. Compressing chunks together seems pretty dangerous; the ZIP file part is only safe if it doesn't compress. ~~~ HerraBRE There have been some security flaws related to compressing data before encrypting it - I don't know if those apply here. But if they do, well, compression is actually optional in the ZIP standard. This would need to be checked carefully if this moves beyond the discussion stage. The purpose of using an archive was primarily to have a standard container for transmitting filenames and metadata, which recipients won't need to install extra tools to work with. ~~~ JoshTriplett If you use ZIP, some implementations will compress, and you'll get security vulnerabilities. And even if your implementation rejects compressed ZIP files, other implementations won't. Better to use a container that doesn't support compression and never will; for instance, tar. PGP/GPG has compression support built-in, for that matter; I wonder if anyone has looked for vulnerabilities like CRIME or BREACH in it? ~~~ HerraBRE I suggested ZIP simply because it's so widely supported, it's built into the stdlibs of many higher level languages and most operating systems have GUI tools to browse the contents. I don't know of any other containers that are as widely supported, but I am all ears. If it's a container that requires the recipient install 3rd party tools, then we may as well skip that part of the proposal entirely. ------ pflanze Meta comment: the website is mostly unreadable with JS disabled because the fixed-position head is covering most of the page, but fine when removing the "position: fixed" from the "navigation" class. (And your target audience will generally be one that prefers to have JS off, I'd think.) ~~~ HerraBRE Thanks, I'll file this as an issue on our site's tracker. ~~~ donatzsky Another issue I noticed: In the FAQ the line spacing is way too small. Firefox, Windows 8. [http://imgur.com/x8zIXFT](http://imgur.com/x8zIXFT) ~~~ HerraBRE Thanks! That one already had an issue filed: [https://github.com/mailpile/www.mailpile.is/issues/9](https://github.com/mailpile/www.mailpile.is/issues/9) ;-) ------ higherpurpose If we could use a forward secure PGP, I think that could be worth breaking PGP backwards compatibility. Isn't the TextSecure protocol kind of that anyway? Why can't MailPile use that with an e-mail interface? It's forward secure, it's asynchronous and you can authenticate users. What more do we need? ~~~ HerraBRE Mailpile is an e-mail client, first, other things second. Maybe we'll support other protocols, such as TextSecure, at some point. I hope so, actually! :-) Note that PFS generally applies to a communication channel, not the way a message is encrypted and signed for long-term storage. TextSecure decrypts messages and stores them using a different algorithm locally - there's no forward secrecy if someone steals your local TextSecure message store. Sadly, the only such separation we have in the world of e-mail (at the moment) is the TLS wrapper around SMTP/IMAP/POP3, which can and should use PFS ciphers. But that doesn't help if the server itself is malicious. That's one of the reasons I'm keen to try and cut out the middle man when possible, and deliver "directly" from client to client. See our SMTorP discussion for one idea of how we might eventually do that: [https://github.com/mailpile/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP](https://github.com/mailpile/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist - forrestbrazeal http://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/287595/hackerrank-tests-banking ====== carlmr <<Most damningly, he says the questions posed by HackerRank and similar tests aren’t necessarily relevant to the work actually done in finance technology roles: “They’re the sort of problems you’re posed at university. – There’s a focus on data structures and algorithms, but this is less relevant when your success as a developer is in building complex enterprise systems.”>> Exactly on point. Also one gripe I have with hackerrank (I did some of the challenges to brush up on some language knowledge), is that a lot of the questions are poorly designed and from obvious amateurs. I still think that neither whiteboarding nor hackerrank selects for good developers. In the end you get people that studied hard to solve a certain class of problem that you'll never need in the real world. It's wasting candidates time, and it still shows nothing, except that your candidates know something unrelated to the job. ~~~ jordanpg Agree, but what is the alternative from the standpoint of the interviewer? These types of challenges are simple to state, self-contained, easy to timebox. For the interviewer for a say intermediate-level enterprise software backend position who needs to quickly sift through 50 applicants, what is the better option by way of code challenges? ~~~ pizzaman09 Credentialing. Seriously. Have a Bar Association for developers. When anyone can do a few weeks of Googling and claim to be a software developer, you're going to get mostly crap candidates. Offload that process to a formal body, like lawyers, doctors, and engineers do. You can hire unlicensed developers, but you do so at your own risk. Then once you're talking to someone licensed in an interview, you can focus on just getting to know them and talking about their past work. Edit: wow, I've clearly touched a nerve. Good thing your doctor is licensed to prescribe something for it instead of a rockstar named Chad who read about MongoDB once but can basically build Uber by this point. ~~~ Joboman555 This is maligned and dangerous. It has been shown that credentialing hurts the marketplace and consumers. Having a credential authority would not cause there to be a skill bar, it would just require all of us to pay money to a worthless authority. ~~~ wolfgke > it would just require all of us to pay money to a worthless authority. Today these authorities are universities. ~~~ lmm HackerRank-style test are one of the few ways into a good career for lower- class people who have the skills but can't afford the credentials. ------ xtracto We faced exactly this problem at the current company I work for. When the company was just starting, we had the great idea to use interview questions "like the ones they make in SV", thus used algorithmics-heavy problems when interviewing candidates. Fast forward 4 years, and I realized that the dev team we have is basically a group of just-graduated Engineers or people with at most 1 year of experience. My "eye opener" moment was when I realized that by asking for difficult algorithms (tree and graph traversal, subsequences, etc) the following was happening: The people that know the most about how to solve these types of problems are students, or people that had graduated recently. Not only that, but this groups is a very reduced sub-group from the recent graduates group, because these people dedicate their Uni free time to solve these problems and get in ACM, IOI competitions. Thus, they don't play with different technologies, they oftentimes don't feel confortable with shell, and finally, the type of systems they develop are optimized to be "used and thrown away". ~~~ jarsin In my network many people that I would classify as bad to some of the worst developers I have ever worked with ended up at Google. They are masters of this type of programming problem solving but could not build a straight forward, maintainable system to save their lives. ------ bsenftner I'm in my early 50's. I've been getting paid well writing code since 15, and have been employed at (arguably) the top of the industry in my fields. Nobody at my level takes tests; none of us would pass them as they deal with utter bullshit. Work for a few decades, at the highest levels of the intersection of business and technology, and you'll find complex and/or sophisticated algorithms often get removed due to support difficulties. Sophistication occurs within the core of the product, which needs to embody cutting edge features and performance, so unless you are the product's core architect, sophisticated algorithms are taboo. The vast majority of software is user interface, import/export logic and other aspects that are not the core of a product. Those non-core features and facilities need to be nimble and simple because they are transitory, and operated by juniors. Frankly, the world where HackerStank is valid is a type of software company that is best avoided, as they treat you 100% like a cog, and not a human. ~~~ expertentipp If a person in the workplace is asked to implement quick search or some sophisticated algorithms on linked lists or binary trees there are only two possibilities: this is a low level and high importance project for NASA/Intel/Lockheed Martin, or one is being teased. ------ lozzo I am in my 40s and have a relatively safe job and not looking for a change. A friend of mine told me to apply for a certain company and I did. They asked me to free an hour one evening and they put me through hackerrank. And I failed. I failed big time. My take away: Surely we all need to revise if we seriously want to apply for a job yet it did feel like the screening was asking me to see how good I am at resolving small problems quickly. Yet, my 25 years of experience told me that we don't need to solve problems quickly we need to solve them rightly. and that takes "mulling over" ~~~ codyb I'm only 27 and I suck at these tests. This year alone I've run the gamut working frontend, backend (Spring), services (clojure), elasticsearch, and a bit of devops. I tried one last night after a nine hour work day in JavaScript and it kicked my butt. First I was thinking solution X but eventually realized Y was simpler, so then I've wasted a bunch of time because the pressures on coding quickly instead of "mulling" over as you mentioned. It was similar with a Ruby one which I prepared for by running through the Ruby Koans. Lots of time spent looking up syntax, and the vast majority of the time I'm not starting entire repos from scratch, so a lot of simple but not oft repeated things can trick you up to. And, to be quite frank, when I'm at home, and I want to program, I want to work on my over engineered, terribly underdeveloped personal website where I get to do things I don't normally do, putz around with erlang and postgres, do the devops and all that other stuff. Ahh the afflictions of the affluent! ------ jondubois HackerRank tests are very effective for companies in that they capture candidates who: \- Have great problem solving ability. \- Low emotional intelligence or self-esteem (don't realize that the kinds of companies that make you do these tests are exploitative and will treat you like livestock). \- Don't have specific ambitions and don't place much value on their own time (prepared to spend tons of time studying/practicing for the tests). ~~~ jarsin The question is though how the hell do we find companies that don't do these test? It seems everyone and their mom are doing it now days, even immigration officials :) ~~~ charlieegan3 There's this list: [https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without- whiteboards](https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards) ------ yodsanklai What I like about these tests, is that everyone can have a shot. You can't forge a university degree you don't have, or a 5-years work experience, but you can take a couple of months and work hard to practice your algorithmic skills. As far as ageism is concerned, I prefer to have the opportunity to show my skills through technical tests rather than seeing my application ignored. ~~~ pc86 > _you can take a couple of months and work hard to practice your algorithmic > skills_ Unless you have kids, or a demanding job, or personal obligations, or you don't want to make learning sorting algorithms for a job you'll never need sorting algorithms a full time job on top of your current full time job. It's just pre-selecting for a group you're in as opposed to a group you're not (the royal you :)). ------ Majestic121 "For experienced programmers like Adler, the new tests aren’t insurmountable – all that’s required is an injection of time to learn the new Hackerrank tricks." Well, yeah. I do that too and I've been out of university for 5 years. You have to prepare for interviews, and to resharpen your skills when you're changing jobs, it's the same whether you're 28 or 48. I understand finding time is harder when you have a family and all, but it should not take much more than a few hours to get back to a decent skill level, and then you get to the interview stage where you can really stand out with your actual real world experience. ~~~ andrewvc If you're a successful working programmer you shouldn't need to study to pass your next interview only to forget it all again after a couple more years on the job. That is why these tests are bogus. If they measured useful skills they wouldn't require any study. I've been working with a lot of graph algorithms lately. I've already forgotten several I learned a couple months ago. That is OK. The more interesting question for interviewees is where they would find the answer rather than whether they can implement algorithm X from memory. If a candidate says "I'd use A* and maybe compare it to similar algorithms to solve the problem" that's enough. There's no reason they need that permanently committed to memory. Almost no one writes A* twice a year. ~~~ wolfgke > If they measured useful skills they wouldn't require any study. I would be careful with this kind of statements. It can also show that most programming jobs don't actually require a sophisticated level of knowledge. ~~~ joncrocks I think this is unfair. As a crude comparison, it would be like a mathematician being asked to recite his times tables. Something he could probably do, given a bit of time and practice, but so outside the normal day-to-day stuff they normally do that it doesn't tell you much other than they spent time preparing. Which is fine if that's what you're looking to measure. I think the point that the grandparent is trying to make is that if you take a group of developers with a good amount of experience and who everyone agrees are skilled in their field and administer a test with no warning/preparation, and none of them score very well, are they suddenly not very good developers or is the test not a very good predictor of whether someone is a skilled developer? ------ gberger These are all good points, but how does the author reach the conclusion that the coding tests are ageist? Ageism was only mentioned in the headline. ~~~ olympus When he says the tests favor people that just graduated from school. Those that have been in the workforce for a while (older people) are focused on "real world" problems and not the academic problems seen on HackerRank. Any system that favors young people over old people is ageist. I'm not saying I agree with the argument (old people have been complaining about young people for a very long time), but the logic is easy to follow. ~~~ Spoom Bigger software companies also typically require "experienced" candidates (read: not new grads) to pass a systems design interview, which is very subjective and typically fairly difficult. This essentially makes the bar for new grads lower. The argument is that this is because they expect experienced developers to be able to enter at a higher level, but the cynical side of me thinks that it's because they really _prefer_ new grads, and this tips the scales in their favor. Remember, Zuckerberg said, "young people are just smarter". I fear that attitude is pervasive, but hidden under the surface; they're not going to just come out and say it, as that would be illegal. ~~~ JohnTHaller You can be a new grad and have experience. I made a point to do work in college that was appropriate for my work field when I graduated. Appropriate summer and part time jobs helped quite a bit as well. Having a bunch of appropriate jobs and projects under your belt (especially a few apps in app stores and code up on github) goes a very long way. ~~~ Spoom Sure, I wasn't arguing that they're mutually exclusive. I was referring to the way that e.g. Google would refer to "experienced" or "industry" candidates. ------ fortythirteen In my experience, any whiteboard test of generic algorithms is more of a window into how the lead developer thinks about the people he manages, than an actual test of programming ability. It almost always denotes a fixed, "I know best" mindset. It's usually a interview killer for me. And it's just a poor way to assess skill. Learn about modulus once and you'll pass every other wizbang somebody else thinks they're the first to give you. You'll always learn more about a candidate's ability by _just having a conversation about programming_ with them. Anyone worth their salt will not only be able to colloquially talk about their skillset, they'll enjoy it. ------ magmasystems Hello all, I am a bit late to this discussion, as Sarah Butcher (the author of the article) just informed me about this thread. This is Marc Adler, the person that was talked about in this article. It's great to see the discussion around Hackerank-type coding tests and the hiring process. There are probably some clarifications that need to accompany the article. First, when I was interviewed for the article, there was no mention of the word "ageism". As something in this thread surmised, it was probably inserted into the title for a bit of "shock value". The article was supposed to be about the correlation of Hackrank tests and the hiring of experienced people who have been coding successfully for a number of years on "real-world" problems. Many of you in this thread fall into that category. Second, I have about 30 years of experience in the industry. I started out in the mid-1980s as a Windows developer at Goldman Sachs, writing equities trading systems, went on to form my own software company (which I had for ten years and concentrated on programming tools), and then continued as a developer/architect for more Wall Street companies. Among some of my roles were Chief Architect of Citigroup's equities division, and Chief Architect of MetLife (a global insurance company). I am currently CA at another big company that is not on Wall Street. All of this time, I have been coding. Recently, I developed an Uber clone in Scala/Akka/Play. I am not completely against Hackerank-type tests for hiring junior devs or devs right out of college. But what I am against is the use of these coding tests to hire people who have 10, 20, or even 30 years of experience. When was the last time that you used dynamic programming algorithms in your job? When was the last time that you seriously thought about Big O? In my experience, a lot of apps use linked lists and hash tables. If you want a nice sorting algorithm, there is one that comes with one of Microsoft's C# assemblies. What is more critical is knowing how to find information and how to apply it in your day to day job. And that's the kind of developer I want to hire ... one who is resourceful and productive. -marc ------ lt Hackerrank is a really good tool to separate the incapable from the capable, but not a very good one to separate the good from the best (or even the average from the good). It's impressive the number of supposedly senior candidates that can't follow simple instructions from the platform or write a couple of lines of code in their language of choice to sort the words in a string or something similar. I fully agree that multiple complex algorithm or puzzle questions are bad - require a longer time investiment that most candidates should be willing to devote to such process, are distanced to the reality of most programming tasks and favor those who enjoy and practice programming puzzles. ------ erikbern I interview 20-30 people per week and send most of them Hackerrank tests. I'm a big proponent of vetting that people can write code, but 99% of the questions on HR are waaaay too "algorithmic". Had to go through almost all of them to find a few tests that are not about graph algos or dynamic programming – finally found a question that was based on regular expressions and a few other ones that I think are a bit more representative of real world challenges. I really wish Hackerrank could add more problems or let employers add their own question. Are there any good alternatives to HR? ~~~ joncrocks We (the company I work for) use Codility for some of our roles. I think you can add your own tasks/questions. ~~~ Spoom Big fan of Codility. They do have a lot of algorithmic questions as well, but they also have easy ones (which we use), and we tested them on our own staff prior to deploying (all then-current staff got perfect or nearly perfect). I would only use medium or above if the question tested something that the job absolutely needed in a candidate. They also allow candidates to add their own test cases easily, which, for the ones that do, tends to be a very strong signal in their favor (they also tend to do better). ~~~ AstralStorm Big NOT fan of algorithmic question that can be summed up in one sentence taking a full page of text description. In most of these coding test the algorithm is easy, but figuring out the catch in the description is harder than actual implementation (unless you're insanely limited and have to reimplement basics from scratch) ------ Xoros As I understand that having a first selection maybe a good idea to sort out if a person can program or not, it amazed me that that sort recruiters seems to not read the applicant resume. I do relate with the article. For experienced developers, it's probably not the best way to recruit. Ask something related to the job, not the degree. ------ davesque This isn't surprising. I remember getting the strong impression when poking around on Hackerrank (between the UX, question quality, etc.) that it was designed by people who just graduated from school. ------ yorwba > When you’ve got a history of having built a high frequency trading system > for Citadel, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, you’ll know a lot about latency > and order flow – but you might not know how to find a maximal duplicated > substring within a palindrome on a HackerRank-type test. I have only a vague idea of the requirements in financial technology, but aren't streams of financial data central to it? And repeating substrings correspond to pattern repetitions, so they might be important, especially the longest ones. I think if you can find the longest repeating pattern in a stream of data, you should also be able to find maximal duplicated substrings in palindromes. Maybe it's more about the way the problem is phrased rather than about the difficulty of coming up with a solution? ------ notyourday TL; DR summary: programmers... err.. software engineers discover that fundamentally most of the companies consider them to be be totally interchangeable, just like janitors are fundamentally interchangeable or models walking down the catwalk during the NY Fashion Week are interchangeable. Since they did not save money for the twenty years that they have been paid quite well, they dont like the prospect. ~~~ expertentipp Outside of certain bubbles (i.e. in most of the world) they have never been paid exceptionally - well, at most. ~~~ notyourday Outside that bubble they were paid just as well compared to the going salaries of other people living outside that bubble. ------ jordanpg Are there any HackerRank-like apps out there that go beyond simple code challenges? ~~~ Majestic121 You can contribute to open source projects for another kind of challenge ~~~ AstralStorm Contributing meaningfully to a big OSS project is a way bigger time investment. Not only you have to understand a lot about the project, you have to actually work on open issues in it. And contributions to tiny projects tend to get passed over anyway. Moreover, certain hiring agreements would consider it breach of contract or confidence. Making your own Github or such portfolio faces the same problems.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Come to Silicon Valley and Learn to Code for Free - teklaperry https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/education/come-to-silicon-valley-and-learn-to-code-for-free ====== cannontwentytwo This really seems like the future of education. Wish the program was offered here in Toronto.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Russian researchers expose U.S. hard drive spyware program - georgecmu http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/02/16/usa-cyberspying-idINKBN0LK1R320150216 ====== dandelion_lover [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9059156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9059156)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tokyo Wants People to Go to Work Earlier to Ease Train Crush - BanzaiTokyo https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-17/tokyo-encourages-earlier-work-commutes-to-ease-jam-packed-trains ====== black_puppydog I've long been wondering why anyone would require (or accept) workin hours so inflexible that they force the employee to be stuck in traffic for some of the precious off-time. It might have made more sense way-back-when most work was mechanical, oriented around production lines or such, but for a society mostly consisting of office jobs, flattening out the rush hours seems like a total no-brainer to me. Being in academia I'm lucky to have pretty flexible hours, and just going half an hour before/after peak hours really saves time or (in my case, since I commute by bike) nerves.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Baptism by Fire: A New York Firefighter Confronts His First Test (2014) - Bud http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/22/nyregion/rookie-new-york-firefighter-faces-first-test.html?ref=sonny ====== xname2 I really hate this kind of writing. After five paragraphs, I still don't know where it is going. What a waste of my time. ~~~ jpatokal What part of "Baptism by Fire: A New York Firefighter Confronts His First Test" did you find unclear?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A JavaScript repository for leetcode solutions - hanzichi https://github.com/hanzichi/leetcode ====== hanzichi I love JavaScript and algorithm, but it seems there is not many JSers that like to have fun with solving algorithm questions	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
New Google Chrome Beta - agotterer http://chrome.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-chrome-has-new-beta_17.html ====== mpk And .... still no linux build. ~~~ agotterer or Mac :( ~~~ reconbot A significant amount of work is going into both those builds but a lot more is needed. As much as I love having a multiprocess browser the V8 JS engine is the real heart of gold of chrome, and that is cross platform. Just nothing uses it besides chrome as far as I know. I do know that the next Mozilla JS engine feels to me at least (and if you benchmark different apps) just as fast. So the next firefox will be on par with speed and it will be cross platform. It will just have tabs that are not as cool. ~~~ unalone Why won't it have cool tabs? Or do you mean in comparison to Chrome? ~~~ nuclear_eclipse Well, FF 3.1 (or 3.5, whatever) will have an improved tabbing system, including the ability to drag tabs out of the window to create new windows, etc, but they will still lack the inherent feature that, IMO, makes Chrome a real innovator: per-tab processes. That's really the single-biggest feature that I would love to see in Firefox. If not for a few must-have plugins that keep me coming back to Firefox, and of course the lack of Linux support, I would have switched to Chrome the moment it came out on that single feature alone. ~~~ blasdel Firefox (and all other mozilla browsers) can't even have multiple processes sharing the same profile _period_. It's ridiculously lame. ------ aliasaria Is it just me or is Chrome just not as exciting as we'd hoped? ~~~ zmimon Chrome is much more than I had hoped for. There are only 2 disappointments with it for me: * where are the plugins? * where are the linux / mac builds. In both cases the waiting has gone on too long to be credible any more. However everything else about it has been wonderful and despite its low market share it has really set a new benchmark for speed and responsiveness that all the other vendors are paying attention to. ~~~ snprbob86 Extensions are coming: [http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design- documents/extensio...](http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design- documents/extensions) Mac versions are in the works: <http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/mac.html> "too long to be credible"? Seriously? A _handful_ of developers build Chrome in an incredibly short period of time. They choose to built it for the largest platform. They have rolled out dozens of revisions. The product is stable and solid and beautiful. And you seriously are going trash them for taking their time with lower priority features such as Mac support? ~~~ calambrac The problem with this thinking is that the serious computer users, the early adopters who are the ones that go out and tell the uncaring masses what to use, are increasingly on Mac or Linux. My parents don't use FF because it's better, they use it because I told them it was better and installed it for them. I'm on a Mac, I can't use Chrome, so the odds of me telling them to now switch away from FF (or of telling users who are still on IE to switch to Chrome instead of FF) are pretty low. ~~~ snprbob86 The problem with your thinking is that you assume Google really cares about how many Chrome users it has. I'm sure that the Chrome team would be absolutely stoked to have a lot of users, but strategically, it simply doesn't matter. The goal here is to advance the state of the art in browsers. Performance, stability, and security (in terms of process isolation) were and still are lacking in all other browsers compared to Chrome. This is very much about pushing the state of the web, not about gaining market share. Google Chrome delivers in this regards. ~~~ calambrac I seriously doubt that Google doesn't care about market share for this thing that they've invested in. Strategically, what good is advancing the state of the art in browsers if people don't migrate to it? Expanding on this a bit: we all know and love Google, but its a business, and one that basically supports the existence of another browser by paying to be the default search engine used in one of that browser's interface widgets. It's not an insignificant amount, either (<http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9804156-7.html>); there's no way they paid that much to develop Chrome. Keep that money in house, make the shareholders happy; keep Chrome open source, keep the hackers happy. Why _wouldn't_ they want users to start adopting Chrome instead of FF? ------ acangiano Is it just me or is Google Chrome not properly displaying feeds? This is really annoying. For example, when I click on <http://news.ycombinator.com/rss> I see a garbled rendition of the feed. Any other browser I'ver tried displays a subscribe page with each feed entry properly formatted. ~~~ truebosko No, this happens to me too. I think it's cause it has no built in RSS reading support yet ------ nanexcool Anyone try this with Windows 7 Beta 64 bit? To make the regular version work you have to add "--in-process-plugins" to the executable to make it work. ------ mixmax So does it still constantly crash or is that fixed? ~~~ snprbob86 Google pushed dozens of patches transparently in the background. My understanding is that you could have every different tab running a different version if you kept them open over long periods of time. The video-related crashes totally disappeared for me within the first month of use. The Gmail related crashes disappeared shortly after that. I haven't seen it crash since and I use it almost exclusively. ------ pibefision We need a mac release...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Riddle of cement’s structure is finally solved - augb http://news.mit.edu/2016/cement-structure-solved-0208 ====== devindotcom I love these base-level, practical advances where even a slight improvement in a formula (provided it is not closely guarded) can, say, improve the strength of a material by 5-10%, meaning that much less of it must be used, which at a scale like concrete's can make for huge changes in usage, markets, processes etc. ~~~ samcheng Concrete is a HUGE greenhouse gas source, so this is also a great boon for the environment. It's estimated that concrete is responsible for 5% of all anthropogenic CO2. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concrete#Carbon_dioxide_emissions_and_climate_change) ~~~ justinpombrio I hate to break it, but it could actually have the opposite effect by disproportionately increasing our consumption of concrete. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox) ~~~ eru At least we get more concrete out of it.. ------ givan There are more riddles to be discovered [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_techniques#Limestone_concrete_hypothesis) Utilizing scanning electron microscopy, they discovered mineral compounds and air bubbles in samples of the limestone pyramid blocks that do not occur in natural limestone. ------ kagamine This may be a stupid question, but given the apparent interest and knowledge of concrete in the comments here, it seems like an appropriate time and place to ask: Why can't they make coloured concrete? Painting it doesn't seem to last/work. It is grey, always grey. Is there no way to apply colour to the mixture and retain its strength? ~~~ mitchtbaum > It is grey, always grey. Check out Decorative Concrete: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decorative_concrete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decorative_concrete) [https://www.pinterest.com/explore/decorative- concrete/](https://www.pinterest.com/explore/decorative-concrete/) Bonus 1) Translucent Concrete: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translucent_concrete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translucent_concrete) [http://google.com/search?tbm=isch&gws_rd=cr&q=translucent+co...](http://google.com/search?tbm=isch&gws_rd=cr&q=translucent+concrete) Bonus 2) White Concrete, using Titanium Dioxide admixture, also cleans itself and its environment: [http://google.com/search?tbm=isch&gws_rd=cr&q=concrete+tio2](http://google.com/search?tbm=isch&gws_rd=cr&q=concrete+tio2) Bonus 3) Nanomaterials add a lot of new potential for strength, possibly color, as well as completely new applications. For instance, carbon nanotubes make concrete slightly electrically conductive, which makes it possible to do easy integrity testing, visible from low voltage current fluctuations near stresses, strains, cracks, etc. I wish I had more info on a prospective range of applications here. Aside A) Clays (of possibly many colors) can also provide an even cheaper, more readily available, and similarly strong building material. Sindhi researchers pre-stressed and baked some test beams, and they were just about as strong as comparable concrete. See Emergence of New Era for Reinforced Baked Clay Construction (Memon, Bhatti, & Ansari): [http://www.quest.edu.pk/rjournals/julydec2013/julydec2013_1....](http://www.quest.edu.pk/rjournals/julydec2013/julydec2013_1.pdf) I sincerely wonder how this ongoing wealth of research on concrete plus many generations old, likely undocumented, skill we have with clay construction could come together. ------ ihartley Here's the PNAS article that they don't link to in the article for some reason: [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/02/04/1520487113.abst...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/02/04/1520487113.abstract) ~~~ jcr Thanks for the link, but it is in the article. On news.mit.edu articles, when they do include links to papers, the links are presented in the "RELATED" list on the right side. They don't always remember to give links to papers, but they are better about it than the press/news sites of most universities. ------ sharp11 This is great! Basically cement is a fractal substance. Are there other known fractal substances? ~~~ dalke [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2577851](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2577851) from 1988 starts: > In recent years it has been shown that the structures of a wide variety of > colloidal aggregates can be described in terms of the concepts of fractal > geometry. The purpose of this review is to discuss some of the evidence for > fractal geometry in experimental systems and indicate how fractal geometry > can be used to develop a better understanding of their aggregation kinetics > and physical properties. so I think the answer is "many". Try [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fractal+material](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fractal+material) for some pointers. ~~~ sharp11 Thank you so much for the pointers. So fascinating! ~~~ dalke Google Scholar is a great resource for these sorts of research-oriented questions. I hope you continue to find it useful. ------ mbroshi In case you are not already excited by discoveries in concrete, this should help: [https://gimletmedia.com/episode/3-concrete/](https://gimletmedia.com/episode/3-concrete/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What is the impact of opening FB and Twitter offices in Vancouver? - gummify How will the opening of new Facebook and Twitter offices in Vancouver, Canada affect the city and will it affect the Bay Area (i.e. recruitment of Canadians)? ====== t1m One of the reasons the big SF/Valley companies are opening Canadian offices is that even Canada's most expensive cities (Toronto, Vancouver) are a relative bargain. Engineering salaries are lower, rents are cheaper, and government money is plentiful (SRED, etc). I think it will do two things to Vancouver's startup ecosystem. In the short term it will be painful as you lose talent to the better funded new competition. In the long term it is a win as the big companies validate the Vancouver 'brand', increasing exposure and attracting new investment.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to improve the performance of your new HP TouchPad - shawndumas http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-news/how-to-improve-the-performance-of-your-new-hp-touchpad/3866 ====== reemrevnivek Unfortunately, the article doesn't talk at all about overclocking. It simply disables logging across the OS - and I _want_ verbose logs for my unsupported hardware. Disabling logging does not mean you're going faster, you're just doing less at the same speed. Of much more interest and utility to me is the fact that the Snapdragon APQ8060, running at 1.2 GHz in the Touchpad, is rated to 1.5 GHz and seems to be stable at 1.7 GHz. Here are a few threads on overclocking: <http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=16908501> [http://www.webosbuzz.com/hp-touchpad/694-how-overclock-hp- to...](http://www.webosbuzz.com/hp-touchpad/694-how-overclock-hp- touchpad-1-5ghz.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Machine Learning Can't Handle Long-Term Time-Series Data - jocker12 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N594EF44CZD2aGkSh/machine-learning-can-t-understand-long-term-time-series-data ====== mjburgess Time is only a symptom of what's missing: causation. ML operates with associative models of billions of parameters: trying to learn thermodynamics by parameterizing for every molecule in a billion images of them. Animals operate with causal models of a very small number of parameters: these models richly describe how an _intervention_ on one variable _causes_ another to change. These models cannot be inferred from association (hence the last 500 years of science). They require direct causal intervention in the environment to see how it changes (ie., _real_ learning). _And_ a rich background of historical learning to interpret new observation. You need to have lived a human life to guess what a pedestrian is going to do. If you overcome the relevant computational infinities to learn "strategy" you will still only do so in the narrow horizon of a highly regulated game where causation has been eliminated by construction (ie., the space of all possible moves over the total horizon of the game can be known in an instant). The state of all possible (past, current, future) configurations of a physical system cannot be computed -- it's an infinity computational statistics will never bridge. The solution to self-driving cars will be to try and gamify the roads: robotize people so that machines can understand them. This is already happening on the internet: our behaviour made more machine-like so it can be predicted. I'm sceptical real-world behaviour can be so-constrained. ~~~ iandanforth The causal argument suffers from a problem of nomenclature. On one side we have the colloquial understanding of cause and effect where a cause is a true impetus of effect. On the other side we have "causal" learning in biology where you're not actually learning causes, just strong correlations. We can learn just about any temporal association even if there is no direct cause-effect relationship. Random reward structures are a way to illustrate this: present a reinforcing stimulus to an animal at random times and a random subset of behavior will increase in frequency. The animal develops a false "causal" belief that a series of its actions is influencing the presentation of a reward. That's why I like focusing on "sequence prediction", even colloquially we know predictions can be wrong. Those predictions can be influenced by low-d world models, but you don't accidentally elevate that model to claim a pure/symbolic/accurate model as can happen with incautious use of the words like "causal." ~~~ mjburgess The key element here is _intervention_. Animals learn by changing their environment. Superstition in pigeons arises because they believe their actions cause the reward, it isnt "mere sequence". Any distribution over two variables observed overtime, _for all time_ can change unpredictably given an environmental change. Animals have rich models of objects and their behaviour over time, these models aren't "sequential", and they are brought to bare on deciding whether mere sequences should be regarded causally. ~~~ iandanforth 'Animals have rich models of objects and their behaviour over time, these models aren't "sequential"' This strikes me as patently false, which means I'm probably not understanding what you mean. What does forward simulation mean if it isn't sequential? ------ nabla9 This is clever crackpottery type brainstorming from a smart person. The author has extremely grand set of connections he developed. It ties down Buddha, enlightenment, vipassana meditation, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, fractals and neuroscience. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Creative thinker should have these kind of crazy ideas and connections every day or at least once a week. I carry with me a notebook that is full of them. Most ideas die as 'premature babies'. They may be interesting to think and write down, but they are not fully developed and never fit together as well as you initially thought. Filtering and piking some of them to work with is important. Giving them up is the difference between crackpot and non-crackpot. Forcing grand connections prematurely makes this crackpottery type. Sharing the creative brainstorm in an essay that does not try make up connections would be easier to read. ~~~ tgflynn The line between crackpottery and genius is a fine one. If blogs had existed in 1900 and a certain patent clerk had written a post on his ideas about clock synchronization somehow being related to electromagnetism, many would have dismissed him as a crackpot as well. The questions this article relates to are among the most profound and difficult that human reason has ever attempted to confront. I think one should be careful in labeling such ambitious speculation as crackpottery just because it doesn't yet amount to a fully coherent and formally testable theory. ~~~ throwawaymath Okay...but Einstein didn't write a blog. He published a paper for peer review. Some of his ideas remained controversial for decades, but he had a sufficiently mature, cogent and well-specified theory that he could at least work through hypotheses and publish results. ~~~ tgflynn He published that paper in 1905. Is it absurd to think that if the Internet existed in his time he might have blogged about his preliminary ideas before publishing a formal paper ? ~~~ throwawaymath Absurd is a really strong word. I will say that I really doubt he'd blog about his ideas instead of just publishing them, even on arXiv, because all the examples of groundbreaking new work in the modern era have been blogged about contemporaneous with, or after peer review of formal papers. I'll also go further and say that, while there's a kernel of validity to your analogy, it's not the right analogy with which to deliver your overarching point. I don't think the publishing method for one of the most significant scientific advancements of the previous century is a particularly good lens for analyzing this blog post. The critical content of this post is far below the threshold usually associated with an idea sufficiently well formed to be publishable. Einstein had a minimum viable theory before he solicited feedback; and when he did solicit that feedback, it was through what we'd consider orthodox channels. ~~~ tgflynn What you say is true. The main point I was trying to make was that given a speculative post of such breadth, which touches on such difficult issues as AGI, how the brain works and perhaps even the nature of conscious experience, and which makes some claims that are at least interesting, I think it's quite presumptuous to assert that these ideas are all nonsense without a deeper exploration of them. I certainly would not want to make such an assertion, despite being troubled by what I think are some inaccuracies in the author's description of certain physical concepts. Now a secondary issue is that it is true that as far as I'm aware major scientific discoveries have typically been initially published in much more developed form and have thus been the work of a single individual or of a relatively small group of closely affiliated individuals. I'm not convinced however that this historical model of very small scale scientific collaboration is necessarily the only one nor the best one in light of modern means of communication. It seems at least conceivable to me that there is a possible future in which the following hold: * There is some kernel of validity in this author's ideas. * A small number of other people find them intriguing and choose to collaborate with the author to further elaborate them. * This collaboration leads to major progress in our understanding of one or more of the areas mentioned above. For me the, admittedly very small, likelihood of such an outcome, justifies the author's post and its appearance on HN. ------ skunkworker This article seems out-of-date by 5 years or more even though it was published today, and I am unsure as to why. It calls out long short term memory but doesn't mention recent (last 5 years) improvements like Gated Recurrent Networks (GRUs) or Transformers (GPT-2, huggingface/transformers) which have shown significant improvements over the traditional LSTM model. These can handle time series data much better than older models could. ~~~ hnews_account_1 Any links to heavy time series based machine learning algorithms? I'm in finance, and while I know how to establish and run a random forest or gradient boost regressor using standard libraries, I've never had a good handle on them. ~~~ cbsmith Most everything Eamonn Keogh publishes: [https://www.cs.ucr.edu/%7Eeamonn/selected_publications.htm](https://www.cs.ucr.edu/%7Eeamonn/selected_publications.htm) ------ joe_the_user This claim seems plausible. The reason seems even simpler than the article. Deep learning requires lots of training data - that data naturally needs to more or less be "the same"; follow "the same" logic. A long enough time series is going to involve a change in the logic of the real world, a change that the network won't be trained for. ~~~ s_Hogg Deep Learning doesn't necessarily require a huge amount of data. What DL does is allow you to fit more complex relationships between input and output than would be the case with, say, a bog standard linear model. If a relationship is complex and also clearly defined in your data, then you don't necessarily need much. In general it's true that may not be the case, but that doesn't make "deep learning requires lots of training data" true, only that "the data used for deep learning models is typically noisy on top of representing a complex relationship". It's a semantic difference, but a very important one if we're to avoid going down the road of just mindlessly throwing compute at every problem. And if we do that, we'll just wind up with millions of Rube Goldberg machines instead of actually solving problems. The change in logic of the real world thing is absolutely spot on, though. Over enough time it becomes basically impossible to disentangle effects. ~~~ joe_the_user _Deep Learning doesn 't necessarily require a huge amount of data._ References? I mean, I know "one shot" and similar approaches but as far as I know, these involve extending a neural network that has been already trained, on massive data, to a little bit more. ------ scottlocklin Machine learning does just fine to _extremely well_ at long term time series data; there are entire branches of machine learning dedicated to this. The fact that this imbecile never heard of these tools is why nobody should be reading his essay. Uber's engineers didn't do this for their human finder because; 1) Image recognition stuff isn't explicitly built to do this (though it easily could be jury rigged to do so) 2) Uber's engineers apparently never heard of the concept of "moving averages" and "threshholds" which would have worked just fine. "More precisely, today's machine learning (ML) systems cannot infer a fractal structure from time series data." -look at this idiot using words he doesn't understand. Muh fractals. ~~~ justapassenger “Imbecile”, “idiot”? Please refrain from personal insults as they add nothing to the discussion. ~~~ scottlocklin "Imbecile" and "idiot" were measured and reasonable adjectives for the gibbering nonsense published above. The drooling lackwit who wrote this should be tarred and feathered for such frippery and nonsense. As I said above; machine learning does just fine to extremely well at long term time series data; there are entire branches of machine learning dedicated to this. ------ cbsmith I'm feeling like this is entire missing the whole world of Matrix Profiles and Time Series Chains... ------ NPMaxwell The article I would like to read is what the challenges are to including a few prior states in navigation. I'm amazed that, when I drive over or under a bridge, my online mapping software changes instructions as if my car were able to levitate 20 feet onto the roadway above or below, even when that roadway is a highway without exit or entrance within a mile. ------ longemen3000 I remembered that neural differential equations are better suited to represent time series data, I saw them being used a lot in pharmacological processes, any additional idea or insight related to this?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Canning Spam: Why is it so difficult to prevent junk e-mail? - dpapathanasiou http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9805795 ====== chmike I see at least two problems at the source of junk e-mail. 1X no authentication of sender. One of the most problematic consequence is that reporting errors to senders had to be disabled. smtp protocol, in its most common usage form, is broken. Relying on DNS to authenticate (DKIM) is just moving the problem to depend on DNS which is also weak from the security perspective. 2X the need for one to be contactable by anybody. This requires to open a door for incoming info which will be exploited by spammers. This is an old problem that managers are facing for years. The role of spam filter was hold by the secretary (human filtering phone calls, visits). The problem 1 is a technical problem and it is a shame it has not been solved yet. Problem 2 is the real root of spamming. There are various ways to address problem 2. This is one of the business model I'm currently investigating. ------ bharath There are 2 cases to look at: 1) Personal email IDs: Most people used some form of web-based email. For those of us that use Gmail for example, I dont know if spam is that big of a problem anymore. Some spam (at least for me) makes its way through the gmail filters -- but its at a level where I can live with it. I would imagine that Google's recent Postini acquisition will end up making the Gmail anti-spam solution better. 2) So that leaves us with enterprises. The solutions proposed in the article will not work for enterprises. DKIM for example, will not work in the botnet case. CAPTCHA based solutions have usability constraints -- they cannot be mandated upon customers and others who frequently mail people within the organization. So most enterprises are forced to rely on gateway based antispam solution thats basically a cat and mouse game. ------ Tichy Both suggestions fail, because spam is usually sent from hijacked computers. Nothing to prevent the hijacker from hijacking the "credit card" and the authentication, too. Also, I don't think it is true that the "undeliverable" type of spam had it's origin on the recipients computer. Spammers just put the email address into the sender field, it doesn't imply a compromised PC. ------ cstejerean It's difficult to prevent spam because there is plenty of money to be made from spam and as long as there is lots of money to be made the spammers will get VERY creative.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Deep learning for source to source computer language translation? - naveen99 Anyone know of any recent work on deep learning for source to source computer language translation ? Since go and real time strategy games were the last out of reach items for machine learning, i feel like this is the next thing that's out of reach of deep learning. ====== colinchartier The only thing I've seen are graph convolutional networks: [https://tkipf.github.io/graph-convolutional- networks/](https://tkipf.github.io/graph-convolutional-networks/) Deep learning is "messy" \- it's hard to use the output of a deep neural network for something as precise as a program, unless maybe as a heuristic with a rigorous "equivalency" harness. ~~~ naveen99 programs are precise, but not unique. so a little messiness can be tolerable. ~~~ psv1 Not really. A little messiness to the human eye is equal to an error for a compiler, which isn't tolerable at all. ------ softmodeling We did some research work on model-to-model translations (in the end, it's basically the same problem) and we ended up with mixed feelings (as we explain in the article: [https://modeling-languages.com/lstm-neural-network-model- tra...](https://modeling-languages.com/lstm-neural-network-model- transformations/) ). Mostly, right now (IMHO) you can only get some success translating very short pieces of code. We used LSTMs for that (which seems to be the more usual approach in this domain)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Building Photoshop 1.0 - nglevin http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2013/3/30_Building_Photoshop.html ====== kristofferR I really hope the author of this great piece shares his rare copy of MacApp 1.1 with the world, so it won't end up as another piece of lost software history only alive in our memories. This guy was incredibly lucky in finding a mostly non-corrupted floppy available for sale. In just a few years the few remaining working floppy originals will cease working and MacApp will end up as just another lost piece of software - unless pirate copies are made. You can say and think what you want about software piracy, but it's undeniable that it has saved a lot of ancient software and games from ceasing to exist in anything other than our memories. Illegal software/ROM archives have probably done more to keep the revolutionary time of the early computing/gaming history alive than all the legal old-fashioned libraries have done combined. [http://www.pcworld.com/article/248571/why_history_needs_soft...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/248571/why_history_needs_software_piracy.html?page=0) Thankfully there is very little enforcement of the copyright law on ancient software - and so few developers/publishers are bothered enough by the fact that someone is illegally enjoying, archiving and sharing their 10-30 year old software that they bother issuing takedown notices - that it is effectively "legal", or at least tolerated in the same way as cannabis is in the Netherlands. The fact that it won't actually be really legal until 2040-2060 is totally absurd, and a powerful testament to how outdated and irrelevant the current copyright laws are. ~~~ pifflesnort Here here! I make an effort to buy old software on eBay when I come across it, archive it in a stable format scan the media, and then store the originals. It would be nice to see a project (would archive.org host it?) that applied standard archival rigor (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivist>) to preserving our computing history. ~~~ alexsb92 The problem i've had sometimes though is that whenever I try using some old software (which is mostly games as I was born in the 92), I often get stuck in making the game play nice with the current set up, regardless if I run it in compatibility mode or not. I guess I should set up some VMs with older OSes, just for this purpose. And FYI the correct expression is "Hear, Hear!" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear>) ~~~ pifflesnort > _The problem i've had sometimes though is that whenever I try using some old > software (which is mostly games as I was born in the 92), I often get stuck > in making the game play nice with the current set up, regardless if I run it > in compatibility mode or not. I guess I should set up some VMs with older > OSes, just for this purpose._ Emulators are also valuable here; the work done on bsnes is amazing, and MAME does a pretty solid job of emulating hardware (including old Mac hardware) accurately. There's also still quite a lot of retro hardware and books for sale through used markets; enough that people make it their (if not particularly lucrative) business to collect and resell 'vintage' hardware. History tends to filter out the bad ideas, such that many of the best ideas survive today. However, human's cultural filters are not perfect, and there are lots of good ideas and intellectual context that can be exceedingly valuable to understanding how things became the way they are, or demonstrating alternative paths (which may even be better than what we have today) that did not emerge for market, financial, or cultural reasons. I really find historical technology to be edifying in the same way political, musical, and broader cultural history is edifying. I think it's a shame that we don't spend as much time teaching technology/design history to software engineers as we spend training 6th graders to understand their local political/cultural history. ~~~ alexsb92 I'll check those emulators out. > I really find historical technology to be edifying in the same way > political, musical, and broader cultural history is edifying. I think it's a > shame that we don't spend as much time teaching technology/design history to > software engineers as we spend training 6th graders to understand their > local political/cultural history. I couldn't agree more. My local Science Center is currently running an exhibit on video games of the past 60 years <http://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/GameOn/>, and while I was familiar with most of the 90s and onward ones, it was incredibly cool to walk by and see all the different hardware and games pre-Win 95 which was the first computer I ever used. I would love to go through a curated presentation of the history of other types of software, and see them evolve over the years, see what concepts stuck and what concepts were dropped in time. It would be even better if along actual demos, I could read about some of the quirks that they had to deal with and anything else to give a young one like me more context about those times. EDIT: It was even cooler going there with my younger sister, and reliving some of the fun times we had as kids. Now that I think about it, a physical exhibit where they can recreate the hardware (even if only on a superficial level of aesthetics), and the rooms and settings where that hardware would have existed, and the software it ran would be incredibly interesting. It would essentially be as close as we could get to a time machine for the foreseeable future. That kind of exhibit would probably become one of my favourites very quickly. ~~~ pifflesnort > _Now that I think about it, a physical exhibit where they can recreate the > hardware (even if only on a superficial level of aesthetics), and the rooms > and settings where that hardware would have existed, and the software it ran > would be incredibly interesting. It would essentially be as close as we > could get to a time machine for the foreseeable future. That kind of exhibit > would probably become one of my favourites very quickly._ I agree, that would be fantastic. You see hardware (especially Apple's) show up in fairly prestigious design museums (eg, [http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=...](http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=3742) ), but it's never functioning, much less available to actually use. ------ Joeri I'm too young to have been aware of this part of computing history as it happened. But I did at one point go back to run photoshop 2 under emulation just to get a feel for its abilities. The amazing thing is that provided you understood the underlying mechanics of how effects like drop shadows or smoke halo's are done you could do them in photoshop 2 (and I assume version 1 as well). Instead of layers, which version 2 did not have, you would just put each "layer" in a separate image and then periodically combine them all in the right order into a target image through the filter effects. You could do reasonably modern effects on machines whose speeds were measured in mhz, not ghz. I often think about how incredibly inefficient modern software is given that we've had roughly the same level of productivity software ability (with varying levels of usability) for a few decades now. I distinctly remember my NT4 system of the late 90's, and how it was roughly as productive as my current machine, and I wonder just how much cruft is inside modern operating systems and applications. ~~~ stinky613 Could you elaborate what you mean by "the same level of productivity software ability"? ~~~ Joeri What I mean is this: When the spreadsheet software was first brought to market, it produced an order of magnitude improvement in ability to do accounting and calculations with the computer. When digital photography tools like photoshop were introduced, they produced an order of magnitude improvement in ability to do image editing. You can go down the line of categories of software, and pinpoint a rough spot where the order of magnitude jump was made. We've stopped jumping in the productivity software category. There are no order of magnitude improvements in productivity software. Each year's software release is the equivalent of city sprawl in urban planning. It grows bigger, and contains more, but it doesn't fundamentally improve the "capability". There are still huge leaps being made in software, but not on the desktop. ------ mamp I have a whole lot of floppies from that period with dev tools but I don't think I kept much MacApp stuff because it required Mac Programmers Workbench (MPW) to compile which was pretty cumbersome. I started using Consulair Mac C, then later LightSpeed Pascal and then LightSpeed C which were pretty awesome. Of course Metrowerk's CodeWarrior overtook these as the main alternative to MPW, including PowerPlant which was a sophisticated application framework. Using C for Mac development was a bit of a pain in the early days because of the stack calling differences between Pascal & C (before the declarations were built into all the compiler libraries), the conversion between pascal strings & C strings, and the work arounds to handle Pascal structure unions in C. ------ codemac I'm getting a 509 when I click on it, and the google cache didn't display anything, so I read it from source.. Does anyone have a decent mirror? ~~~ akie <https://www.readability.com/articles/dhqfc9qw> ------ ayuvar I'm surprised I haven't seen this site before. As someone who cut his teeth on the early Mac it sure explains a lot. Not many people would write an entire blog entry about how the Mac's dynamic memory allocation worked: [http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...](http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2011/1/22_MoreMasters%3B.html) ------ kalleboo A cursory web search shows that the mystery "Eve" component appears to be a brand of copy protection dongle. ------ tambourine_man _Writers need to study the writing of others, and usually they do. Computer programmers? not so much._ Ah, c'mon. WebKit, Linux kernel? ~~~ coldtea Yes, what about them? Who studies WebKit? Or the Kernel for that matter? A minority? Because that's perfectly in line with "not so much". ~~~ tambourine_man Who reads Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner? Your average reader will find them inscrutable. That's just how it is. Some works are simple, elegant and great. Others are hard, deep and also great. It has nothing to do with literature or code. ~~~ coldtea > _Who reads Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner? Your average reader > will find them inscrutable._ He was talking about writers though -- not average readers. And your average writer has certainly read Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Faulkner. The argument was writers vs developers (not average readers vs average users). ~~~ klodolph > And your average writer has certainly read Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Faulkner. I seriously doubt it. I even doubt that your average lit major has read them. ~~~ rrreese Anecdote from NZ, all the English majors I know have read several if not all of the above authors (including one who read Ulysses 13 times after he left university). In fact I would be surprised if you could get that degree without doing so. I read a lot and I often read the author blurbs, my second anecdote is that it seems a large number of writers studied English/Literature. In addition authors often drop hints to having read the above, listing works as recommendations or influences, or dropping qoutes or allusions. Still I'm sure there are plenty who haven't read those authors, but perhaps they have read Shakespeare, Melville, Tolstoy etc. ------ sGrabber It would be interesting to go through code of those days ~~~ nearengine A good chunk of it is 68k assembly, but you can check out the Pascal+asm source here: [http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop- source-...](http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-source-code/) ------ vilgax "Error 509: Bandwidth Limit Exceeded", can't even find in google webcache or web.archive.org. Any other way to read this? ~~~ nglevin (EDIT): Original post is too long for an HN comment. In lieu of that, here's a Pastebin cache of the original post. <http://pastebin.com/LNmWc8LH> Let me know if you run into any issues. (2nd EDIT): I just updated the Pastebin cache with the original author's e-mail address, as it was in the blog. Don't mind me, I'm just the schmuck who HN-ed his server's bandwidth. ~~~ hackmiester Here is a formatted version that I created from the Google cache source code: <http://ompldr.org/vaHh3bA> ------ rikacomet Google cache is not working ? [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2013/3/30_Building_Photoshop.html&hl=en&strip=0) ------ umurgdk bandwith limit XD	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Employees of Facebook, what's it like to work there? - rblion Former or current. Use a new username if you have to. I've learned about the suicide of Qin Chen and it's made me wonder what life is like inside Facebook.<p>Thanks for taking the time to answer and discuss this. ====== jsjckendj I was a former developer at Facebook. If you have the chance, watch YouTube techlead’s video on Facebook. He summarized it better than I can. There’s a strong lack of management and high blame culture. “Empower engineers and focus on impact” is the motto there. Basically that statement has lead management to say “here’s something and go make something happen” Directions are ambiguous and leadership has no vision and when things go right, they get all the credit but shit goes down, engineers get blamed. Not to mention the ambiguity in the performance review. It’s highly political. My team judges engineer quality based on lines of code written and not quality of code. On top of that, there’s this weird pride/arrogance in everyone at Facebook. Also, due to the lack of vision and direction of team, everyone is doing the same thing but different way. It’s just a terrible org structure. I need to emphasize this point. This is a company wide thing and not a team thing. Everyone suffers this issue because mark sucker berg and Sheryl sandderp refuse to take any accountability for the culture and direction the company is going ~~~ catacombs > If you have the chance, watch YouTube techlead’s video on Facebook. He > summarized it better than I can. He's seriously an ex-Facebook employee? I thought it was satire. > Everyone suffers this issue because mark sucker berg and Sheryl sandderp > refuse to take any accountability for the culture and direction the company > is going I've read over and over that Sheryl Sandberg was the worst thing to ever happen to Facebook.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
OpenMediaVault 1.0 “Kralizec” released - gandave http://www.nasstorageserver.com/2014/09/15/nas-openmediavault-1-0-kralizec-released/ ====== gandave OpenMediaVault (“a next generation network attached storage (NAS) solution”) has gone 1.0. Free and Open Source NAS, challenging FreeNAS.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Txtodo – a day-to-day todo list for coronavirus quarantine - figbert https://txtodo.app/ ====== codingninjas How's building on SWIFT UI? We will be using it for the first time for a client. ~~~ figbert TLDR: I like it. Working with SwiftUI is fantastic – I always had trouble getting the storyboards to work properly (not really a nocode guy). The rapid changes and control over _every detail_ that SwiftUI provides, while at the same time managing the things you don't need to handle yourself (such as with the Spacer struct), is really a big step in the right direction for Apple. With that said, there's still a lot to be done – it doesn't totally feel finished. When you run into these missing bits – like a loading indicator – you have to write wrappers around UIKit components.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Kippt: A Bookmarking App to Watch - jorde http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/kippt_a_bookmarking_app_to_watch.php ====== spokey Hi Jori and Karri. Kippt does look promising. I have a little bit of a meta-question for you. Do you have any tips or advice you could share about getting covered on RWW with an early stage app? Based on a cursory look I think you'll agree that Kippt is an MVP right now. A well polished MVP, but still an MVP, and one that isn't markedly different than (and in some ways you've already called out, somewhat lacking in features compared to) a host of Delicious- and Instapaper-type apps. (I don't intend that to be negative, so I hope you don't take it that way.) How did you manage to get RWW to cover Kippt at such an early stage? ~~~ jorde Hi Spokey, You're right, Kippt is really in the MVP stage right now while you could consider it as our second MVP: We originally build Kippt over 1 year ago during one day for Forrst App Contest (<http://mykippt.appspot.com/>). Today's Kippt was build on weekends during past 1.5 months remotely but we already had a pretty good idea what we wanted to do. While we needed to cut a lot of corners, drop features etc we wanted to have a product we and our loved ones would like to use. So far the feedback has been extremely good, so it's safe to say that pushing the early product was a right decision (also validated many of assumptions). What comes to the press and RWW: we didn't contact any press outlets. In fact we decided to post Kippt only to HN so that we could get feedback and some users outside our friends. I think Marshall saw the submission or some tweet as he didn't contact us for the article, all the information was taken from our submission and other public sources. So I guess we just lucky but I like to think of it this way: It's always the product that does the selling, not the PR (but fanatic users would also help :) I hope this clears things out. It has been an exciting day and it's really nice to hear that you liked how Kippt looks (Karri deserves credit for that). I should probably write a blog post about this but if you have anymore question, feel free to shoot me an email (jtlallo and the usual gmail suffix). -Jori ------ enra Just submitted our app for Show HN earlier today: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3155117>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Nicco says: Google = Evil - bootload http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/03/10/niccoSaysGoogleEvil.html ====== bootload _"... What you may not know is that we also spend a lot of time thinking about the security that goes into those products, and more specifically the ways we can protect you and your private information. ... As you can imagine, our engineers are smart and curious and are on the lookout for security anomalies and best practices in the industry ..."_ Nice comparison between what "google says" and what "google does" ~ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133633>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Where: Like Foursquare, except with profits and lots more users - cwan http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/14/youve-heard-of-foursquare-how-about-this-start-up/ ====== gojomo The name change from 'uLocate Communications' to 'Where' was sideways at best. 'Where' is hard to google, prone to confusion in spoken communication, and very generic. For example, a conference for their market is already called "Where 2.0". I'm wary of 'Where' as a name. Will 'Where' wear well, if whereever it's discussed we're also hearing competitors' wares emphasizing 'where' features? Where, with all these word collisions, will Where find the werewithal to forge a brand image where we're likely to see 'Where' as meaning what Where wants 'Where' to mean? ~~~ imp It may be a confusing name, but it's not hard to google. They're already #1 for the term "where": <http://www.google.com/search?q=where> ~~~ gojomo Kudos to Google for that... but it's still hard to find discussion about 'Where'. Try for example [where reviews] or [where company management]. ------ foulmouthboy The article mentions it, but the achievement aspect of Foursquare is a Very Significant Differentiator as opposed to a footnote. You have two competing services with similar functionality and one is fun to use. Investors are betting that the fun to use one is the one that will catch on and stick now and in the future. The fact that the not-so-fun competitor is making money should make Foursquare investors jump for joy. It's a proof of business concept that's been done for them. ------ barmstrong Wow...amazing no one has heard of these guys. I love the fact they have a business model and are cash flow positive. Sleeper hit... ~~~ smokinn The article said they had several million more users so it's not really a sleeper; it just isn't bouncing around the Silicon Valley echo chamber. ------ endlessvoid94 It seems that people always underestimate good marketing. Why don't startups spend more time/money on marketing? No time, I guess. ~~~ timdorr Actually, it really shows that hype is overhyped. Cashflow and profits are where it's at. ~~~ maukdaddy True, unless you really want the big $$$ payday/buyout. Then the hype might be worth it over cash flow and profits. ------ biafra Except it does not work outside the US of A. ~~~ mmacaulay Yep. Not even available in Canadian iTunes store.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Sslnotify.me, a free serverless opensource SSL cert monitoring service - alexfortin https://alexanderfortin.tumblr.com/post/159003883536/sslnotifyme-yet-another-opensource-serverless ====== alexfortin Hello, I've posted about my experiment here not because I think is particularly cool nor useful, but because I'd love to have some feedback from everybody interested in FaaS/Serverless, especially from who has some real experience building solutions with FaaS and willing to share his/her insights. Thanks for your time	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Language/framework pros and cons for writing a web server nowadays? - pvnick I'm not looking for "best," but I would like to hear what you guys would consider for choosing between some of the modern languages/frameworks.<p>Despite the flak that PHP gets, many successful web servers have traditionally been written using PHP, and with modern frameworks like Laravel which use PHP's OOP features it seems acceptable.<p>There are also great Python frameworks like Django, Flask and Pyramid (I love Flask, and I don't see much talk about Django these days).<p>Rails seems like it has always been a top choice, even recently.<p>I also frequently see articles touting Java as a robust web server choice.<p>What do you guys think? ====== gt565k Django and Rails are similar in the sense that they come with batteries included and favor convention over configuration. Also, Django recently received a grant from Mozilla, so expect some great features to be added. [https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/dec/11/django- awar...](https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/dec/11/django-awarded-moss- grant/) Personally, I've worked with Django, Rails, and The Spring Framework (Java). I'd choose Django or Rails. I do prefer Django, but Rails has a much more vibrant eco system and a lot more plugins (gems) that let you do things pretty fast. Really you need to be clear on what problem you are trying to solve, because one framework might be better than the other. For example, I've worked with Rails and it has great support for apache solr. If I needed to do full text search on a lot of records and use solr to index them, I'd choose Rails. Define the problem you're trying to solve, and see which framework is best suited for it. ------ brudgers What is the goal? What is the architecture? What is the business proposition? Who is going to maintain it? What kind of data will be in the backing store?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
US intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic - cyang08 https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intelligence-reports-from-january-and-february-warned-about-a-likely-pandemic/2020/03/20/299d8cda-6ad5-11ea-b5f1-a5a804158597_story.html ====== digikazi Any intelligence service worth its salt would have kept a close eye on the situation developing in China, so in that respect this is not unexpected. Personally I knew this could be very bad when I started hearing news about the Chinese qarantining first Wuhan, then the surrounding cities. This involved huge numbers of people and was done quite swiftly and on a scale never seen before in modern times (to my knowledge anyway). Quite frankly it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I did wonder at the time how long before it reaches our shores (not that long) and what would our response be like (nowhere near as organised and focused although I guess things are picking up). I'm in the UK. ~~~ smacktoward The newsworthy bit isn't that intelligence services noted the potential threat. It's that the White House chose to ignore them. ~~~ digikazi The White House ignoring sound advice and doing its own thing... we've had a few good years of that. How is that news? (By White House I mean one person, and I'm saying this in a jokey way) ------ WheelsAtLarge Part of the problem was that we thought this was just another virus that we could control. We were over confident and it didn't help that our president thinks he knows everything. We have seen that most countries were unprepared for the avalanche this virus is turning out to be. I think that only the countries that have gone thru a previous epidemic have it under some control. The world was caught unprepared. ------ JamesBarney To be fair this has been on Reddit and Twitter since late January. So it wasn't exactly a state secret. Here is the post that first alerted me to the possible pandemic 55 days ago. [https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/eusojf/conc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/eusojf/concerning_the_recent_wuhan_coronavirus_outbreak/) ------ chrismcb Didn't the intelligence community warn of a likely pandemic with sars and swine and... ~~~ monkeydreams >Didn't the intelligence community warn of a likely pandemic with sars and swine and... Yes, and MERS as well, and these warnings were listened to. Actions were taken. Experts deployed. Testing enacted. A whole machine of pandemic expertise, sitting dormant, shuddered to life, and pinched off the supply of fresh hosts for the viruses. This time, not so much. ~~~ michaelmrose I seem to recall that we were told that those people could be hired back really quickly if needed while disbanding the part of the NSC that was supposed to take point on this.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What resource allocation strategies do IaaS providers use? - push7joshi This is a classic case of multidimensional bin packing problem. The problem of assigning VMs to PMs is known to be NP-Hard. It would be great to understand/know a high level solution ignoring the detailed complexity (SLA etc.) ====== nostrademons "It's just bin-packing!" I think you'll find that most IaaS providers largely follow the latest heuristics in established bin-packing literature. (Source: worked at Google, knew some folks on the Borg/Omega teams.) ~~~ push7joshi constraint satisfaction came up during our discussion.. wonder if that would provide an appropriate solution at scale	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Do you use Managed Servers? - Complete Im wondering: Do you use manages servers for hosting your applications? I do so and would like to discuss the pros and cons of various providers. But I have the feeling most of you here on HN use servers where you have root access.<p>To me, it seems very logical to use managed servers. Because it abstracts away some more parts of the whole stack. What do you think? ====== dotBen I could write an essay on this subject, but here's a few thoughts: Managed servers != no root access. Most good managed server providers will give you root and their 'managed service' is to keep things patched, deal with issues that span your cluster, higher tier of support than just making sure the machine is booted and network is available to the device, etc. Sure, there are some providers don't give you root, which brings me to... Be very cautious of providers who don't offer root and want to do all your app deployments for you. If you subscribe to the "devops" concept then deployment is part of the development process and can't be thrown over the wall and given to someone else to do in isolation. Also, agile methodologies are now enabling us to deploy once a week/day/many times a day rather than the more infrequent cycles enterprise software is used to. These non-root folks are not going to handle a deployment for you on a daily basis. To not give the customer root is to really not subscribe to these new ways of thinking and new ways of doing business. I would ask why you want to go down the managed server route in the first place? If you need help with your initial setup and deployment find someone in your network to help you on a consultancy basis. Simple on-going server maintenance should be something most technical people can pick up, and if you get stuck go back to your consultant. You'll probably still be better off $$ given the cost savings of managed vs dedicated hardware. Plus VPS and/or EC2 solutions might fit you better than 'bare metal' hardware solutions, but both are (usually) non-managed services. The only managed services I do recommend is if you want to go down the Heroku route, which is excellent if it fits your technology stack and business. But I don't think that is what you were referring to. ~~~ Complete With managed servers I meant: Keep the LAMP stack up, running and secure. No App development. From my point of view it makes sense that a managed server provider does not give out root access. So theres no discussion whos responsible for what. ------ spooneybarger We tried going that route but it meant we didn't control enough of the stack to avoid issues related to updates etc. Bugs would arise. Didn't work out. ~~~ Complete What kind of bugs did you encounter?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Story Of Joseph Nacchio And The NSA - Esifer http://www.businessinsider.com/the-story-of-joseph-nacchio-and-the-nsa-2013-6 ====== tptacek This came up last week, too. Joseph Nacchio sold millions of dollars of Qwest stock after gaining access to information about weak future sales and, according to other Qwest insiders including the company CFO, being warned specifically about the future value of his shares. Nacchio also wasn't the only Qwest exec to get taken down in the probe, and, obviously, Qwest wasn't the only company to be probed and ultimately prosecuted during the same time frame. ~~~ etherael > Joseph Nacchio sold millions of dollars of Qwest stock after gaining access > to information about weak future sales "Gaining access to information about weak future sales" = He was threatened directly by the NSA that they would cut existing and not provide future contracts to the tune of approximately 3bn worth of revenue if he didn't play ball. How is he supposed to notify the public of this fact when there's an implicit gag order in the requesting? So he has two options, take the financial hit for doing the right thing and telling them to go fuck themselves, or selling the stock and taking the legal hit for breaking insider trading laws. ~~~ tptacek Yes, he's expected to "take the financial hit." It is illegal for insiders to trade on secret information. You're not thinking it through carefully: Nacchio _defrauded_ whomever bought his shares at their inflated price. ~~~ etherael I'm completely aware the legally subservient option is to "take the financial hit". You're not think it through carefully, I just don't see that as a particularly relevant or salient point, the law is just an arbitrary set of rules the biggest bully has put in place, they probably congratulated themselves on a clever ploy putting him between a rock and a hard place rather than considering whether what they were doing and if the law was sane and gag orders attached to business negotiations with millions of dollars worth of personal repercussions for people under intense pressure to submit to the state was acceptable ~~~ tptacek I am not smart enough to understand how anything NSA did could have justified Nacchio defrauding his shareholders by willfully and knowingly selling them stock in his company at an inflated price. Neither, it seems, was the court. ~~~ etherael In my humble opinion, the least morally questionable action to take in this scenario would have been to ignore the gag order, explain in public why the business was being lost, and take the rational sale option because of it. Even this option isn't that great from his perspective though, I don't know what the penalty on breaking those gag orders is, I guess it's more than the penalty for insider trading? They put him in a situation with a stack of bad options and even the best ones weren't that great, sitting back and criticising his actions after the fact whilst laying none of the blame on the people and institutions that created the situation is something I'm not smart enough to understand why you think is an acceptable analysis to take? ~~~ tptacek He committed a fraud. Not against the government. Against his own shareholders. He sold equity in Qwest at prices he knew were not reflective of the underlying value of the stock, based on actual actionable secret information available to him as a company insider. That's a crime, as it should be. NSA shouldn't pressure people to comply with gag orders, but that doesn't excuse Nacchio from choosing to harm his own shareholders simply to make additional tens of millions of dollars over what he already had. You can come up with 1,000 different ways to rephrase what you said; it will never convince me that multimultimultimillionaires should be excused for defrauding their own shareholders to increase their own bank balances. ~~~ etherael > NSA shouldn't pressure people to comply with gag orders, but that doesn't > excuse Nacchio I agree with you, I just think what the state did was worse. Not only that but that kind of behaviour is par for the course for them rather than an exception to the rule that they resorted to in order to deal with a situation not of their own creation. You are right though, he was no angel. ~~~ tptacek If you want to use Nacchio as an example of the unscrupulous tactics of NSA, I have no objection, as long as you don't try to rehabilitate Nacchio in the process. ------ jessaustin I found this bit from the article interesting: _In July the FISA court ruled that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment 's restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures "on at least one occasion."_ And yet I've read so many assurances from the legal eagles here on HN that since the relevant service providers already had these records, there was no way the Fourth Amendment applied. After all, it's just about your papers in your house! Because 18th Century! Yeah, I knew that was bullshit, but it's nice to learn that even the craven, supine FISA court agrees. Try again guys! ~~~ etherael Lawyers have this habit that they share with coders, when they are consulted as to why the system is behaving in a certain way, they treat it in an exercise in debugging legislature, and tracing the path of execution of case through the legal system, much like a coder will debug a program, and trace the path of execution through the computer, and the various methods and decision trees in the source. The difference is though, when a coder finds out why the program is doing what the user doesn't want it to do, he will say "See, there you go, we can fix it now" where the lawyer will say "See, there you go, it turns out you're in the wrong because the law says so", the deeper embedded in the fabric of the legal profession they are the harder it seems to be for them to consider the possibility that although it's the law, it can still be utterly and completely wrong. ------ lmg643 this story has been floating around for a week or so now. i remember when the qwest insider trading scandal first broke back in 2001 - it fit with the times - bernie ebbers, worldcom etc - corrupt telecom executives. it is quite disturbing to think that a CEO might have been targeted in this way for refusal to cooperate with the NSA. so much so, that i have a hard time believing that this is actually the case. lots of people in jail have elaborate theories for why they are innocent. the market topped in 2000. spring of 2001 the market was already in serious trouble. nacchio would undoubtedly have known about earnings shortfalls that would occur as part of the implosion of the telecom bubble. the company had a number of accounting irregularities and was engaged in phony broadband deals with enron. qwest would not have escaped the market troubles with an NSA deal. let's keep some perspective here people. ------ smutticus This article is rather short on details. Here are a few more articles for the interested. [http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_7230967?source=comment...](http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_7230967?source=commented) [http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-ns...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm) [http://www.denverpost.com/nacchio/ci_11786798](http://www.denverpost.com/nacchio/ci_11786798) ------ rayiner ...after "being convicted of insider trading in April 2007 for selling $52 million of stock in the spring of 2001 as the telecommunications carrier appeared to be deteriorating." ~~~ salem Selective enforcement? There don't seem to be that many cases: [http://www.sec.gov/spotlight/insidertrading/cases.shtml](http://www.sec.gov/spotlight/insidertrading/cases.shtml) ~~~ rayiner Selling stock based on private knowledge of the company's deteriorating finances while trumping up the company publicly is not your run of the mill "everybody breaks the law" selective enforcement situation. The SEC brings tons of insider trading cases (the page you linked to points out that the ones on the page are just "examples"). See: [http://www.mofo.com/files/Uploads/Images/130116-Insider- Trad...](http://www.mofo.com/files/Uploads/Images/130116-Insider-Trading- Annual-Review.pdf) (Page 3.). The SEC and DOJ together brought 86 insider trading cases last year. Two recent convictions were Raj Rajaratnam (hedge fund manager) in 2011, and Raj Gupta (former chief executive of McKinsey) in 2012. It's a favorite go-to for the SEC because it's relatively easy to prove as far as financial crimes go. ~~~ salem "The SEC brought 58 insider trading actions in FY 2012 against 131 individuals and entities." Seems like a small number to me considering the size of the market. The chances of being caught seems to be small indeed, unless someone is really looking. Speaking of Raj Gupta, he was connected with Raj Rajaratnam, who was funding a group with alleged close ties to the Tamil Tigers. I'm not saying there was no wrong doing, but something fails the smell test. ~~~ tptacek Raj Gupta was a _huge_ Democratic Party fundraiser, so much so that his status within the party was the lede in many stories written about the case. Yet it was a Democratic administration that he helped put into power that took him down. ------ johng Wow. Play all _or else_ is what it sounds like they told him.. and then followed through :( ------ squozzer It's probable Nacchio was trading stock illegally. It's also not surprising the feds would use whatever leverage they could to obtain compliance. Cops recruit snitches all the time using similar tactics. The difference is that snitches exist to inform police of criminal activity, not to spy (or enable spying) on their customers.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google is the number one employer of Bernie Sanders donors - karangoeluw http://qz.com/665099/google-is-the-number-one-employer-of-bernie-sanders-donors/ ====== ocdtrekkie Google employees are also among the top donators of Obama's last reelection campaign, and Google employees have contributed to over half the current sitting Congress. The White House regularly places Googlers in executive branch positions, and Google representatives visit the White House weekly. Google is also almost functionally immune to investigation by the US. If Google thinks he has a chance at being President, Google wants to make sure he knows Google is happy to support him. And the fact that our administration won't go after Google for antitrust... well, clearly there's no relation. ~~~ karangoeluw Important to say: Google does not officially endorse any politician, or encourage employees to donate to any campaign. ~~~ ocdtrekkie SOMEHOW, Congresspeople who receive massive donations from Google employees have written incredibly specific letters to other governments directly begging them not to investigate Google. Anna Eshoo is a great example of a bought-and-paid for Google shill. Her primary donor is Google (technically, :Google employees:) and she's actually actively campaigned for Google on the international stage. [http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N0000...](http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00007335&cycle=2016) <\- $24k so far this cycle, $34k/top donor last cycle. And shilling: [http://thehill.com/policy/technology/225332-lawmakers- protes...](http://thehill.com/policy/technology/225332-lawmakers-protest- european-plan-to-break-up-google) [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/anna-eshoo-zoe- lofg...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/anna-eshoo-zoe-lofgren- google_n_2160994.html) The other Congressperson mentioned in both above received $22k from Googlers so far this season, and $32k/top donor last cycle: [http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N0000...](http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00007479&cycle=2016) Google doesn't OFFICIALLY endorse anyone, but they buy out of a lot of them. EDIT: My comments have been rate limited for being unpopular, so my response to the below comment is: In the 2014 cycle, Googlers donated to 252 members of the House of Representatives, and 64 members of the Senate. Obviously, the majority of which aren't presiding over Silicon Valley. Here's a list: [http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips.php?id=D000022008&...](http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips.php?id=D000022008&cycle=2014) ~~~ ZeroGravitas I've never heard of Anna Eshoo before, here's the first few lines of her Wikipedia bio: _Anna Georges Eshoo (born December 13, 1942) is the U.S. Representative for California 's 18th congressional district, serving in Congress since 1993. She is a member of the Democratic Party. The district, which includes part of Silicon Valley, includes the cities of San Jose, Redwood City, Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Palo Alto._ It doesn't seem that unusual for the representative of the area that a large company is based in to help defend their interests.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Is Roundup the Cause of 'Gluten Intolerance'? - yiedyie http://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/gluten-intolerance-from-roundup-herbicide-zw0z1402zkin.aspx?newsletter=1&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=RF%20eNews&utm_campaign=03.03.14%20RFSR ====== Angostura Ummm. Those authors look familiar: [http://www.examiner.com/article/bogus- paper-on-roundup-satur...](http://www.examiner.com/article/bogus-paper-on- roundup-saturates-the-internet) One is a long-time 'independent scientist' and the other is s a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with a degree in Biophysics from the 1960s. The nature of the peer review isn't really clear, I'm not familiar with the Journal, but this paper makes my thumbs prick. ~~~ tonyarkles Good catch. I hadn't looked up the authors, but their associations had raise some red flags for me. ~~~ collyw Good science should be good science independent of the authors interests, no? (Not saying this paper is good science, but I dislike the attitude of dismissing based on who the authors are). ~~~ tonyarkles Yes, but... I wouldn't 100% judge the work based on authorship, but it definitely makes me think twice when Toxicology research is published by a computer scientist. It makes me wonder even more when that work is published by Americans in a Slovakian Toxicology journal. And when it's published by two people who have published work of questionable quality in the past... I think those are decent heuristics to flag this work as having a higher probability of being flawed. Sure, it's not 100% objective, and all scientific literature should probably be looked at through the same critical lens. I'm not a toxicology researcher, and I don't have time to thoroughly investigate the claims of the work. This is enough of a heuristic for me to say "hmmmm, not going to make any life changing decisions based on this work until there's more data from other people" ------ markkennedy I find the arguments for Hygiene Theory being the cause of the increase in autoimmune diseases and allergies much more credible, and it seems to have more science behind it. There was a good discussion of "An Epidemic of Absence", a recent book on the topic, on EconTalk this week. The basic premise is that these disorders may be caused by a lack of microbes and parasites in the modern Western world. The lack of those microbes and parasites causes our immune systems to be overly aggressive towards harmless outside substances (peanut allergies, celiac disease) or mistakenly aggressive towards our own bodies (Crohn's disease, type I diabetes, etc.) Sounds very plausible to me, but it lacks a villain, which I think makes it an unsatisfactory explanation for some. [http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/03/velasquez- manof.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/03/velasquez-manof.html) ------ drcube Almost every time based graph goes up and to the right. Big whoop. Maybe the internet causes gluten intolerance? Or maybe Roundup caused the rise of social networking? ------ tonyarkles This is fascinating for me for a few reasons. I have family members who suffer from gluten intolerance (not full blown Celiacs where a a few µg of gluten causes problems, but pretty bad). It's a long journal article, and I haven't read the whole thing in detail (and probably won't). A good portion of it is outlining correlations between the use of glyphosate and the prevalence of Celiac's and intestinal infection rates. There's a lot there, and while it's enough to raise suspicion, it's not damning evidence as far as I'm concerned. Definitely worth looking into further. The other thing that jumps out at me as interesting are the authors: Anthony Samsel is listed as Independent Scientist and Consultant, and Stephanie Seneff is associated with CSAIL at MIT; not a typical group to be writing toxicology journal articles! My take away: I hope that this research encourages more discussion and research, but I don't think I want people making policy decisions based on it. ------ beardicus What am I missing here? Aren't all the graphs in that paper just a correlation/causation joke waiting to be made? I could probably fit "number of mobile phones sold" to the same curve and have "proof" that mobile phones are causing gluten intolerance. The rest of the paper is way above my head, but certainly seems speculative and doesn't appear to have any actual evidence or study behind it. Given the motivated reasoning that happens often regarding topics such as these... I'm suspicious. ------ baldfat The GMO hate still goes on. I use to have friends in Manitoba that ran a wheat farm. Guess what I saw all the time? Round up. This was in the early 1990s. I have a funny suspicion that Round Up has not been sold more that matches the graph. Also we all know how valuable "Peer Reviewed" science is. Just open the data and let others pound at the same "evidence." ------ markmassie Is US electricity consumption the cause of "gluten intolerance"? [http://www.rmi.org/Content/Images/KnowledgeCenter/RFGraph/US...](http://www.rmi.org/Content/Images/KnowledgeCenter/RFGraph/US_electricity_demand.jpg) The answer may surprise you. ~~~ vixen99 Excellent point though it is worth nothing that glyphosate does indeed chelate metals whereas it's difficult to see US electricity consumption having quite that effect in vivo or even in vitro. ------ chesh I don't have a view one way or another on the scientific accuracy of the report. Anecdotally though I live in Europe and gluten intolerance seems just a fraction of the issue it is in the USA. Just look at the gluten-free section in any supermarket, or ask in any restaurant for a gluten-free dish. This topic surely deserves an extensive scientific investigation to 1) identify any statistically significant difference in gluten-free intolerance, 2) what root causes can explain the difference. ------ trebor It may be an influence, but what about those of us who've had organic grains for most our lives? I don't think it's more than correlation at this point. ~~~ untothebreach I was under the impression that typically, "organic" does not necessarily mean "pesticide-free." I often see foods that are billed as "organic _and_ pesticide-free," but I always thought "organic" just meant non-GMO. Feel free to correct me, as I am just going purely off my own experiences here, but that was my impression. ~~~ chrisduesing Organic, in the US, is regulated by the USDA and includes no genetically modified seeds and no use of chemical pesticides. If something has the green label it was tested and certified. Sometimes food manufacturers call out things like pesticide-free because there is confusion among consumers.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Treksit – Graph theory game - thenormal http://treksit.com/?graph ====== pimlottc Nifty. The arbitrary size of the playfield (and its invisible border) was annoying at times, though. More suggestions: * A reset button when things get too messed up * A "check my work" button that highlights errors, which can be hard to see when there get to be a lot of points and edges * Ability to select and drag multiple points (particularly useful when you need to shift an entire section over to have more room to work * A clearer explanation of the UI (I was reluctant to click on the diamond icons for fear of losing my progress) * Some sort of ending (even just a "Congratulations" message) ~~~ bjackman There is a reset button if you click the upward-pointing arrow at the bottom of the playfield then the "play" icon. Also loved this game. Found it challenging - seems like a good starting point is to find the nodes with the least links and put them around the edge, maintaining all the symmetries you can. Love the feeling of inversion that you get when you eliminate a load of crosses in one move. ------ subim Fun! This is similar to Simon Tatham's Untangle ([http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/](http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/) and the sgt-puzzles package on Debian systems). ~~~ tantalor Original version is [http://planarity.net/](http://planarity.net/), made by me! I rewrote it in JavaScript a few years back: [https://github.com/tantalor/raphael.planarity](https://github.com/tantalor/raphael.planarity) ~~~ thebrainkid I wanted to say thanks for your game! I loved it when it first came out! ------ jakubp Nice. Went through maybe first 8-10, but it becomes boring without some kind of 'progress bar'. How long before something happens? Will it become harder with time, or what? A commentary or some hint at what's next would be interesting :) ------ tantalor Looks like this is just a mashup of Tronix by Danijel Duraković with some other visual effects. [http://pulzed.com/demo/tronix11/](http://pulzed.com/demo/tronix11/) ------ pbhjpbhj J age 11yo says it's "cool-a-rooney". Personally I liked it, but the instructions were too terse to get us started properly and the hyperspeed thing is a little strange, I assume it's just a distraction? One problem we had was that J opened the menu at the bottom of the [small] playing area, that covered the "right arrow" that moves on to the next map. It wasn't obvious how to get back to playing, the "play" button didn't close the menu and the collapse arrow wasn't visually apparent. ------ wodenokoto Nice game, but as others have mentioned, the game area is way too small, and you need to able to move the entire graph as one, as you often get points placed towards a corner when you are trying out different positions of points. Also the "restricted area" link with the "Bonus" alt-text feels like it takes you on a bit of a spammy ride. I tried it, and it took me to a site that said something about randomly generated music and a link with the text "show me something cool", which took me to yet another page, in yet another window with a bunch of animated dots. Completely irrelevant and distracting. ------ dharma1 loved it. it's interesting how quickly the brain develops a sort of intuition how to solve them after a few levels. Would be good if there was a leaderboard with times ------ skottk And here I thought that my years fighting with UML modeling tools would go completely wasted. ------ applecrazy I was doing a puzzle and it showed me a button to a "restricted area"\- is this normal? ------ johnhenry I'm more impressed by the background than the game itself, though both are well done. ------ am185 what happens after 20? there was nothing? ------ thenormal Easy peasy puzzle ~~~ tptacek Easy peasy? Isn't graph planarity NP-complete? ~~~ karlding No, graph planarity can be determined using Kuratowski's theorem, which essentially states that a graph is planar if and only if it doesn't contain K_{5} or K_{3, 3}. I believe the planarity test algorithm has been improved, such that it can be done in O(n) using the edge addition method [1]. [1] [http://www.drdobbs.com/planarity-by-edge- addition/184406070](http://www.drdobbs.com/planarity-by-edge- addition/184406070)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Database of Criminal Politicians? - charliemagee Does anyone know of a database that contains criminal convictions of local, state, federal politicians? There is some text stuff on Wikipedia but I would like the ability to sort. ====== Top19 The closest thing I can think of is that Utah has a database of a white-collar crime. Would love to see more systems like that. ------ wdMker58 database on the amount of benzodiazepam medications prescribed with add medicines?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Pagoda goes in private beta - Heroku for PHP - ranza http://www.pagodabox.com/ ====== apl Their website is ridiculously well designed -- possibly on par with Heroku. Doesn't say much about their solutions and infrastructure, but it does signal great care. ------ sparkygoblue Pulling only from github seems very restrictive to me. So, basically if I want to put a private project on PagodaBox, I have to also purchase a github account. ~~~ tonius36 What's wrong with a github account? Give them some love. Their private option is cheap. Over all once you start using github it's hard to go any other route anyway. ~~~ andypants Other people may use their own git server or a different git host. Anyways, since git is decentralized, why go through github? What about pulling/pushing between the user (or any arbitrary git client) and pagoda box directly? Edit: I watched the screencast, your deployment process is a bit different than I expected so I guess using github is probably a good idea. ~~~ tonius36 Yeah good points. Anyway looks like here's a more straight forward reason: <http://guides.pagodabox.com/getting-started/git-github> "...the feature-set available in the Admin Panel and the Pagoda Terminal Client are directly tied to Github's API" ------ jinushaun The PHP Fog web designer could learn a few things from the Pagoda site. I found Pagoda much more informative and has better usability than Fog. The graphics and images on Pagoda aid the user in understanding how Pagoda works and why it's better than traditional hosting, instead of hitting you over the head with over-the-top beautiful graphics that ultimately don't say or mean much as on Fog. The typography also makes the copy easier to read. The video demo is very slick. ~~~ blantonl It's funny, I _almost_ down-voted you thinking this was a sarcastic post since my first impression of Pagoda's homepage was "wtf?" - but, their site caught my attention and encouraged me to progress through the process to find out more. I'm not sure whether the designers of Pogoda's site are flat out geniuses or skating on thin ice. ------ armandososa I like it how the screencast didn't use a terminal; not even once. This is very different from the other _Heroku for x_ initiatives. That, bundled with their absolutely gorgeous design is a huge differentiator from the alternatives. ------ epenn I like the idea of Pagoda pulling from the github repository, but what happens if github is for any reason inaccessible and you need to make an update to your site? Is there a backup method? ------ mgkimsal From the video: "Select which framework your using" "your" should be "you're" ------ dashr PHPCloud isn't built in PHP. Anyone know if Pagoda is built in PHP? I'm more partial to supporting a php PAAS that is intimately familiar (on a day to day operational basis) with my language. ~~~ twasp Same group that runs this Magento (PHP) extension shop: <http://www.tinybrick.com/> Also recalled a tweet awhile back, here it is: <http://twitter.com/#!/PagodaBox/status/60133469107388416> ------ ghempton sounds a lot like <https://www.phpfog.com/> ~~~ noodle if we're naming competitors, here's another: <http://cloudcontrol.com/> ~~~ andypants And here's a big list: [http://blog.huchunhao.com/current-and-upcoming-cloud- platfor...](http://blog.huchunhao.com/current-and-upcoming-cloud-platforms) Thread complete. ------ blantonl Does anyone know who their hosting provider(s) are? I'm curious to know if they rolled their own infrastructure or if they are cloud based. Also, does anyone know about their funding and the team? On the surface it looks promising, but I'd like to hear more about the team behind the effort and further details on the back-end behind the black box. ~~~ lfittl Judging from WHOIS they seem use Softlayer. ------ apinstein Yay! More PHP PaaS services with a real cloud architecture. Very nice. Please add PostgreSQL and I'll start using it! ------ whatusername This is gorgeous: <http://www.pagodabox.com/architecture> Almost making me want to write PHP ------ milano Site alone makes me wanna give them a try :) ~~~ shaunxcode right? I was about to post some snarky comment about "php is the heroku for php" but then I went through their site and was actually impressed. It would be rad if they had a free tier which turned into a "paid" account if it hit a certain threshold. ~~~ tortilla They do have a free tier: <http://www.pagodabox.com/pricing> ~~~ shaunxcode hah I totally misunderstood that. Once you log into the dashboard it's really clear because you see the slider w/ $per 30 days. It would be cool to stick that on the pricing page directly. From what I can see per 30 days: 1 clone($0.00) .. 25 clones($864.00) ------ leftnode Wow, this is seriously awesome. Gorgeous design and the admin panel is incredibly easy to use. ------ digitalnalogika Request invite if you're interested, I got it pretty quickly. Great design indeed. ------ simonhamp I have 10 invites...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Introducing Gruen Tenders - a simple way to induce an unbiased prognosis - datageek http://kaggle.com/blog/2010/08/01/introducing-gruen-tenders-a-simple-way-to-induce-an-unbiased-prognosis/ ====== datageek I wonder if there's a business model in this?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
IPhone 5 Scorns Standards Promise To European Commission - neya http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/09/14/2053241/iphone-5-scorns-standards-promise-to-european-commission?utm_source=slashdot&utm_medium=facebook ====== mtgx I'm not an Apple user, so I might not fully understand how Apple's connectors work, but it seems to be a dick move from Apple that even though they are going to use a completely new connector, they _still_ not going to adopt the microUSB standard.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Google SRE vs. Google TSE - nextinline I have been debating whether to go for SRE or TSE (Google Cloud Technical Solutions Engineer), as I understand if I go with TSE interview, the offer will be TSE, not SRE.<p>Recruiter gave me a good tour and in this YT video [1] it does seem TSE will do development too (more of a traditional customer/professional service engineer, but building new tools or enhancing existing tools to do better job).<p>But I am hesitant to do more support work than SRE (which seems to work on Google itself at scale, and sounds more "exciting")<p>Anyone can provide their experience working as or working with TSE? How likely a TSE can work on similar SRE-type of project? Has any TSE ever get to build tools which are now used outside of TSE organization?<p>[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFHk2wUaCCs ====== pritianka While I haven't worked in those roles myself at Google, a lot of my colleagues have. TSE and SRE are completely different. One is solutions engineer or sales engineer that's focused on the clients and helping them buy and get started while the other is maintaining Google's own infrastructure. I work with a lot of Google SREs and I would say you will find some deeply technical and amazing people there. You can probably build yourself for any engineering role in infrastructure by joining that function. I do not know too many TSE's closely but that's much more of a sales oriented role and that's what you can expect. If you want to develop your sales skills, go with TSE. If you want to build and create things in infra, go with SRE.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How do you reverse burnout? - randomnumber314 I've been working 50+ hours a week for the last six months. Between my "9-5" freelancing for a full-time client, and my evening personal projects, I pretty much spend 7am-10pm concentrating and mentally engaged. For the last couple of weeks I'm having a hard time caring about the client's project.<p>At this point I'm almost ready to go find a job working for a single company who will make all the decisions and just delegate to me "code this."<p>So what do you do to reverse (or prevent) burnout? ====== a3n Do something different. You're working too much, and some of it is under your control. Stop working on your personal projects for a bit. This gives you time to rest, and think clearly. Do different work. If that means taking a job, as you mention, then fine, do that for awhile. A compromise would be to work for a contracting agency; there are full-timish yet time-limited jobs, so you can let someone else tell you what to code, yet can still leave the job without any social disapproval. Or just work for a company for awhile. When you're in a rut, get out of the rut. Do something different, whatever that means to you. ------ nunez This thread is useful. I think I'm in this state myself. Between work (which there is a LOT of), learning new things, commuting (which I often spend learning new things or working) and working out at the gym (which isn't relaxing), I feel like I spend most of my day being "on". It's been difficult for me to think or sleep. Constructing sentences outside of making first impressions is difficult for me. I often feel like I "don't have time" or that I'm in some sort of "crunch mode." I don't know what to do. I think I'm either burning out or burnt out some time ago but just don't know it. Either way, this thread is very enlightening. ------ zippy786 Quit whatever you are doing. No work for couple of months (may be even a year), only fun stuff like movies, sports, exercise, good food and may be even light non-work research if you are into it. I'm actually in the same boat as you are and am planning to quit my job and do nothing, starting next month. Just gaze at stars from high altitude and realize that this world is big. Job and stress are small things that should not matter in one's life. Then one day you might wake up and find motivation to work less, earn more. At least I hope to do the same. ~~~ Jach I'd read a blog of your experience. ~~~ nunez Same here! ------ kdamken Sleep. Make sure to get at least 8-8.5 hours, every night. You'll start seeing the benefits very quickly. You may feel more rested and be tempted to stay up later. Don't do that. Get your 8 hours, every night. ------ code777777 It sounds like your body and mind need a rest. IDK about you, but even though I'm healthy and in pretty good shape for my age, my legs, glutes, lower back, shoulders, etc. get really tight from sitting all day and into the night (I work similar amounts and have for years). I have a couple of techniques that work for me. \- Taking breaks. Sometimes it's reading HN, other times it's preparing a small meal, or just walking around, or whatever. \- Mental time off. When I have something stressful with a client or there is some big meeting set for a few days from now I prepare and that's it. When I'm comfortable or even if I'm anxious I just tell myself, "I'm not thinking about this again until such and such day or time." It's really empowering and works. Probably the best thing I do. \- Yoga, just a little to loosen up, I like Tara Stile's videos on YouTube, they are for all ability levels. \- Mobility work. One good example is the Limber 11. Learn about your body. A foam roller, a ball, and some light aerobic work get your blood flowing and endorphins going. It just feels good. Also a little time at the gym you get to see other humans and it can be mentally relaxing since your body is doing the work instead of your brain. \- Skydiving. It's a sport that I really enjoy. I know it sounds odd but as soon as you step on a plane the rest of the world just goes on hold. You're focused on that jump and what the objective is (4-way, competition, whatever) that nothing else really matters. It's a common theme with skydivers. Perhaps you can find something similar in your life. \- Learning. I enjoy learning about new things and it's a mental break. Just take it easy, do what you do well, learn how to turn focus on and off. It a skill that you just have to work on like anything else. ~~~ AnimalMuppet Ultimate frisbee works pretty well for me. It's not just the exercise. The change of mental pace from "deep, focused thought" to "read and react to what everyone else is doing in this half second" works fairly well as a mental reset. (Skydiving may be the same; I have no experience with that.) Or just go for a walk at lunch. (I realize there are days, or maybe even months, when the weather will make that impractical.) ------ jenkstom I survived triplets and a wife with a brain tumor - all within a couple of years. Stress does damage to your brain. Permanent damage. It may take you years to reverse the damage. I would consult a professional (starting with a psychiatrist to get your chemicals back in balance) and consider some sort of meditative activity. Like Tai Chi, or playing guitar, or whatever. Or even meditation. Sleep, eating well, exercise, taking the right medications, avoiding stressful situations and finding ways to destress - you hear these all of the time, and they are things that people still don't do anyway. If you don't, now would be the time to start. ------ chatmasta Stop all your obligations, inform anyone who matters that you will be back in three weeks, and leave the country. Do not take your laptop. Go to the beach. Come back when you're ready. You'll be amazed. ------ Anand_S This is what I have found to be useful in such situations 1> Take frequent breaks during the day. (5-10 Min for every 45 min of work). 2> Getting more organized (read Getting Things Done by David Allen) will help you get more work done in less time and also free up some time to spend on yourself. 3> Find meaning in the work you do. 4> Meditate for at least 10 min every day and try to bring mindfulness into your daily life. 5> Spend at least 1 hour each week to reflect/review and clarify your goals in life and see whether you are going in the right direction? 6> Make a plan to spend at least 1 hour each day in activities that help you grow.(eg. Exercise, Reading, writing a blog, learning new things, new hobbies, etc) 7> Practice gratitude before going to sleep. It will have a positive effect on your sleep and general well-being. It will also improve your productivity during day. ------ tostitos1979 Reversing burn out is not easy. I was working crazy hours in my last job and managed to get a far better gig. I thought 2-4 weeks off would do the trick and help me reset. It took a lot longer. Stuff I did that helped: 1) Play mindless video games into the night. I kept having nagging guilt in my mind and had to force myself to ignore it. 2) Buy some books. I have them sitting on my desk. Just haven't been able to will myself to read any fiction (feel guilty about indulging myself). I did manage to read a few non-fiction books that I was interested in. So, baby steps. 3) Hang out with friends/spouse. Realize it is okay to do NOTHING for a bit. I'm lucky this time. My passion has come back and I can code better than ever. But I am taking this experience as an important lesson. Need to be careful to not get burned out in the future. Edit: I also let my online learning subscription (won't name it since I have nothing bad against their product) expire on purpose. ------ PaulHoule Get aerobic execise, enough to make you sweat, at least half an hour a day, ideally more like two hours. If you like to bike, run or something like that, great, otherwise use the cardio at the gym. If you are feeling unexplained pains, consider starting an SNRI antidepressant such as Effexor, otherwise consider a plain SSRI. This provides an armoring effect against stress without interfering with the natural process of maturation. Take a vacation. Put your side projects on the shelf for a while or hire somebody else to do them while you bring your current engagement to an honorable conclusion if that is at all possible. ------ phunkystuff ITT - you need money to reverse burnout ------ roddux Communicate with your client and tell them that your 50+ hour weeks have to become 9-5, or you won't be able to support them as a client any longer. It boils down to a choice between saving your sanity and continuing to work in the field, or burning out and quitting-- losing a major income stream in the process. Is this one client worth that much? ~~~ AznHisoka According to the thread, He spends 9-5 on his clients and the rest on his own projects ~~~ roddux I took the "9-5" in quotes to mean that he actually works more than 8 hours, but I now see the alternative interpretation. ------ percept Agreed with the other poster: take a vacation. Go someplace. If you're like me, sometimes that requires a self-applied kick to the posterior, but it's usually followed by "Why didn't I do this sooner?" and its sibling, "Why go home?" ------ zerr Charge more and work less. Get rid of 9-5[+] stigma. ~~~ randomnumber314 I should heed this advice. Ironically, I feel too overworked to research the best way to implement this ------ tmaly take a break. Go for long walks/hikes and clear your head. If you can, go on vacation to a remote island with little communications. ~~~ randomnumber314 This is what I need. Just like everyone else is saying--take a break--but I need to force the separation between myself and obligation. ~~~ code777777 I said it above (in my long post), but this is powerful: "I'm not thinking about this again until such and such day or time." If you can master it, you'll feel the weight lift off your shoulders almost immediately. The same is true for work, "I'll only work on this during these three hours and then I'm done until tomorrow at 10 AM" or whatever. Also, burnout after a lot of work is normal. It happens to all of us. Relax, take some time off, do what you love and you'll come back even stronger and more determined than before! ------ yolesaber Smoke a ton of weed, get lost in music / art / film / your own non-coding creative projects. Works for me. ~~~ randomnumber314 Good advice for some people. I don't like supplementing reality with drugs. ~~~ yolesaber Fair enough! Simply subtract that clause from the sentence and I think you'll still find an effective treatment for burnout.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
We can know whether we are in a simulation - carlos http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2012/10/we-can-know-whether-we-are-in-a-simulation.html ====== lutusp No, as a matter of fact, we cannot know this. No matter how many people speculate about it, it's not a property of the universe we can determine in a scientific sense. It's empty philosophy -- but I repeat myself.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Marvin Pipkin, inventor of the frosted light bulb - everbody https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Pipkin ====== axaxs > Not being aware his assignment was a type of joke, he went about the task as > if it was something that could be done and had been done before. I've read stories similar to this before, iirc assignments given as homework. Is there a name for this method, or comprehensive list of examples? ~~~ _hardwaregeek You're probably thinking of George Dantzig: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig) It's not unbelievable that this happens. Ramanujan presumably solved some important problems without knowing their context in contemporary mathematics: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan) ------ teslabox I was not previously aware of the origin of the ubiquitous frosted light bulb. Thanks. > The public felt that the glare from clear transparent incandescent lamps > gave off a harshness that was unwanted by most people. Another side effect > was that they made it hard to see objects in immediate vicinity of the lamp. > They desired a lamp that had a softer light with no glare. The first half of the 20th century was spent figuring out how to use artificial lights safely and effectively. In the last decade we've forgotten almost everything our predecessors figured out. For example, my father had some great hanging lights over his kitchen stove. These provided just enough light to get around the kitchen - if you wanted more light, you could turn on the other lights. His wife redecorated and replaced the red-colored globes with clear globes. Now there is no diffusion effect, and visitors without baseball hats get the 'ice picks to the eyes' ("glare") effect from direct exposure to the filaments. They also installed terrible 3000K LED bulbs in their new fixtures. I switched them out for proper incandescents, so I don't get headaches when I visit. The only LED bulbs I find to be acceptable are some of the 2700K bulbs. If the 3000k bulbs are shielded by a lamp shade they're tolerable, but still slightly too blue. Old street lights were fine. LED streetlights put out more more lumens per watt, but the quality is terrible. My brother's neighborhood has been LED- ified, and now has a terrible night experience. My city has mostly orange low pressure sodium [LPS] [0] lights still, but the state highway department is gradually switching out their LPS lights for "fake white" LEDs. Flagstaff has Lowell Observatory (astronomers). They have wonderful night lighting. A few business flaunt Flagstaff's dark sky ordinances with non- shielded floodlights, but most of the city lights and businesses' lights are a pleasant orange (or yellow), and only over-stimulate my eyes when I look directly at them. The "lighting resource center" has information about good lighting practices: [https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/](https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/) [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-vapor_lamp#Low- pressure...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-vapor_lamp#Low- pressure_sodium) ~~~ el_benhameen I think some people must be more sensitive than others to the color temperature of light, myself included. My parents (who are otherwise wonderful people) use the 3500-4000K fluorescents in their living room instead of the much more warm and pleasant table lamps. When I walk my dog at night, I often see the blue-green glow of what must be 5000K bulbs coming from many of my neighbors houses. And my office mis-ordered bulbs for their track lights and ended up with a random mix of 3000K and 5000K bulbs; I seriously considered finding a new job until I was able to convince them to change the bulbs, but nobody else really seemed to mind. By the way, Philips makes a line of dimmable LED bulbs that are 2700K at full brightness but go down to 2200K as they dim. Installing those in my dining room fixture was a revelatory experience. ~~~ wwweston Some people may be more sensitive than others, but there's a reason why computer glasses filter out blue light, and it's not simply personal. Had a similar experience to yours with an office, except the blinding 5000k hangers also bothered a lot of other people, to the point where normally many of them were unscrewed/turned off... _except_ when we had clients we were trying to land coming to the office. Then management decided that we needed to have them all burning full brightness in order to make a good impression for key visiting clients. Lighting sensitivities are yet another thing that are easy to personalize for in sane office plans, but can be a big drain in an open floor. ~~~ lostlogin I assume many have bought a light bulb that emits white light when they want a warm light. Everyone look like a zombie, it’s truely awful. Who wants those bulbs and why? ~~~ Tade0 My SO uses 5000K lights for drawing, otherwise the colors are off in sunlight and in photos. I also prefer outdoor lighting to be on the hotter side - low temperature lights to me look too much like sodium lamps. ------ doitLP >This idea of having a second treatment to smooth out the fine-grained texture to dimples came about by an accident. From penicillin to vulcanized rubber to frosted glass. The crucial moment for so many inventions and discoveries was accident. But I remind myself that in nearly all cases a dedicated professional working diligently, iteratively for long periods of time is the perfect person to a) notice the accident in the first place and b) realize it’s significance and put it to use. ~~~ adrianmonk And c) overwork themselves even to get tired and have accidents. ~~~ adrianmonk Well, I ruined my own joke by typing "even" instead of "enough". And I didn't even invent anything in the process of having this accident. ------ benj111 "One day, while he was pouring the weaker solution into a bulb, the phone rang. In the process of answering the phone, he accidentally tipped the bulb over before it had enough time to finish cleaning out the previous etching. When he returned to his work, he accidentally knocked the glass bulb off the workbench and onto the floor. To his surprise it did not shatter, as etched bulbs normally did, but bounced a few times and then rolled under the workbench" I'm always intrigued by the cognitive dissonance in rewarding inventors for doing difficult things, then lauding them for accidentally stumbling upon something. Yes I get that you make your own luck etc. But luck doesn't seem to be accounted for in our present IP system. ~~~ namanyayg Seems like you've higher chances on stumbling on something accidentally useful when you're trying to do difficult things rather than when not ~~~ benj111 Well yes, that's what I was talking about with making your own luck. My point was that any discussion of IP revolves around work put in, and skill demonstrated. But a lot of the folklore is based on chance discovery.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
CEO Turns a Seldom Used ccTLD Into a Booming Global Brand - DotSauce http://www.dnjournal.com/cover/2010/november-december.htm ====== iwwr Companies just have to pay a little more for domain hosting due to the threat of .co brand hijacking or phishing. It's the nearest legitimate thing to blackmailing, not a brilliant business plan. ~~~ falsestprophet Two more _brilliant_ business plans: .om and .cm ------ fletchowns Jeez, think they have enough pictures of that dude in the article? ~~~ smashing I personally like their innovative use of BOLD. ------ dshankar I wish the article provided some insight into HOW he turned it into a 'booming brand.'	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why is programming fun? - signa11 http://www.grok2.com/progfun.html ====== michaels0620 I remember early in my programming career, I had a program that was a tangled mess and making changes was requiring more and more effort just to keep everything straight. I was able to refactor the code into three well contained, clean modules. I distinctly remember the sense of satisfaction I got from that. I imagine it is similar to the satisfaction a wood worker gets when everything is just right. Not joy per se, but certainly a sense of satisfaction. Another programmer at work explained to a non-programmer why he liked programming by comparing it to cross word puzzles or sudoku. Again, it isn't that cross word puzzles are a joy so much as it is interesting and satisfying. ------ conanite I bet the pleasure in finding a new way of looking at a problem or a solution, applying an old solution in a novel way to a new problem, or learning to understand new concepts - recursion, tail-call-optimization, metaprogramming, (or whatever cool thing your next language does) - is neurologically similar to what happens when we "get" a joke. New paths are traversed in your brain and you giggle like you did when you first figured out how to put two lego bricks together. For me, anyway, programming is just a grown-up version of playing with lego. It's true though that in a corporate context, you are dealing with _other people's bugs_ , policies, procedures, documentation, specifications. Most of that isn't programming, even though non-programmers can't always tell the difference. Even after an attack of debugging, when I've figured out what the problem was, and reconstructed the thought process that led to the code that led to the bug, there's a spark of delight when my brain creates this structure. The debugging may be joyless, but not the fixing. ------ almost Among other things I think it's the huge rush I get when I figure out something hard. Can't be beat :) Then there's the satisfaction of imagining a system and slowly putting it together. The exhilaration of a new program. Problem solving at different scales. The anticipation of a finished application. All good. Not to say it's _all_ fun _all_ the time, but I don't need to be paid to want to do it :p ------ glymor This is nice but it's also nonsense. Nether a program nor a poem is easily tractable. A change in one place requires rebalancing elsewhere. We try and minimise this with interfaces etc but it's never _"so flexible, so easy to polish and rework"_. Snowflakes and leaves are not each designed. The minutiae of programming couldn't really be more repeatative. The _"pleasure of making things that are useful to other people"_ only happens if you project isn't cancelled and actually gets used. Outside of a startup this confluence of events is heartbreakingly rare. I'm not against writing poetically but this is more Wordsworth than Tennyson. ~~~ 10ren _Tractable_ compared with non-thought stuff - try reworking wood or metal. But you're right that it's impossible to eliminate all dependencies, and a large interdependent structure becomes tedious, and scary, to change. "Throw one away", Brooks even admitted (if you can.) Alan Turing predicted that programming need never become boring because you can automate the mechanical aspects. If it really _is_ repetitive, you can automate it. One can also make small tools that are useful to others. e.g. I got a thrill even from a trivial script to automate away a tedious step, when other people used it. I don't believe in a personal god but I respect people, like Knuth and Fred Brooks, who do. If they think a tree is designed, I'm happy to think of the intrinsic beauty of a tree - and of all nature. I couldn't make any of it. It's surprisingly renewing to spend some time in nature. ~~~ glymor Perhaps I wasn't clear. I wasn't refering to whether God designs. I was refering to the differences in each snowfake or leaf being of random source that is what I meant by "each". ~~~ 10ren Oh, you mean they aren't individually designed (without commenting on whether the process that generates them is designed or not); and the variations in each one (that snowflakes are the canonical example of) are just random fluctuations. The beauty comes from the process, not the randomness. I see what you mean. I think taking a personal God point of view, one would say that those random fluctuations are not random, but designed; just as each individual person is a real textured thing. Every individual is more than a mere variation on a platonic theme. My own tendency is think that when we don't understand something, it's easiest to model it as random; but whether it really is random is something we don't know. So I'm with Einstein in the "god does not play dice with the universe" on this one. BTW: on a separate note, I'm concerned about you. Having a project canceled is very distressing. The last time I heard someone talking like this (an editor at my publisher, who just had an important proposal knocked back), they committed suicide a couple of weeks later. I sensed something was a little odd, but I didn't do anything. Please, if you are feeling low, ring one of those suicide helplines. I'll be very relieved if you do (or if I'm ridiculously off-base, even more so). ------ edw519 There are only 2 things that make me jump up and dance spontaneously: (a) when a great song comes on in a dance club and I'm with a hot date (b) seeing something I've just written work for the first time I don't know if I'm bragging or complaining, but lately, I get a lot more of (b) than (a). ~~~ jcromartie > seeing something I've just written work for the first time When some large piece of fresh code works on the first try, I call this a "hole in one" :) ~~~ blhack Best "hole in one" I ever had. (I am not a programmer, feel free to submit this to the dailywtf, or coding horror, or make fun of me and call me ugly if you want to). There was a huge huge huge file that I was trying to run a perl script against. The [text] file was about 3 million lines long. What my perl did was split it out into a CSV file so that I could actually _work_ with it (the person sending to me sent it as a space delimited file that didn't really follow its own specs, or have any explanation about what was going on...blah blah, it sucked)... Anyhow, my perl (stupidly) was doing: foreach $line (<file>) { do_something; } The problem was that it kept coming back with an out_of_memory error. The other problem was that it wan running serially (is that a word) on an 8 core box....it would peg one proc with the perl, but the other 7 would just sit there being lazy. My (very hackish/duct tape) solution was to split (which should have been a big hint) the file into 8 pieces, then call the perl for each one of the 8 chunks...8 cores, 8 threads...should be full of win, yah? I used wc -l $filename to find out exactly how many lines were int he file, and then gave my new perl script that as the number of lines for each file. The new script did something like: foreach $line (<file>) { print FILE1 $line; } (there was a couple of if statements so that after it hit $num_of_lines / 8 it would go to file2 file3 file4 etc. After that mess was all finished, it would call a shell script that did: magicscript file1 > file1.magic & magciscript file2 > file2.magic & etc. etc. etc. until it was done, then it would do cat *.magic > fixedfile which I could then work with... I put all this into another shell script that did echo "FULL POWER TO MAIN DEFLECTOR (this could get messy, look out!)" perl engage.pl by some miracle it worked on the first try!! I have since fixed this mess of code. At the time it was a "we don't have time to do it right, just DO IT!" moment, so...whatever :). ------ shaunxcode For me it is the challenge and mental exercise of creating something from thin air which is both elegant and succinct (somewhere between code golf and SICP). I love coming across domains/problems/ideas which truly have not been solved/solved best and conjecturing ways to approach it. Something about that just makes me feel ALIVE and excited - like keeps me up at night and dreaming in syntax excited. One of my latest projects has been simply an sql -> awk (and other unix tools) parser so I can use sql instead of native awk imperative programming. It took me all of an hour to whip the perl script together but when it was working with inner joins on flat files I was like "woah sweet!". <http://aql.googlecode.com> ------ parenthesis In a nutshell, I find programming can be immensely satisfying because it can be simultaneously a very creative and a very technical pursuit. I find I need to be creative and technical. If I'm doing a lot of the one to the exclusion of the other, I start to crave the other. At the best of times, at least, programming gives me enough of both. ------ hamai I like programing, but it gets me bored real quick. Sometimes I think its the keyboard... I wondered about mouse programming for a while but then I got bored again. ~~~ jlees I hear you can program with Legos now. ------ hs i like it because there is no physical limitation and raw materials involved for creating something network programming nullifies the distribution constraint to me basically programming is freedom (no constraint, insane leverage) ------ sho I don't think programming is "fun" per se. It's merely the means to an end for me. It's certainly satisfying and rewarding in numerous ways to create new things, but I just spent 8 hours debugging and refactoring Javascript and let me tell you "fun" is not the first word that springs to mind to describe the experience. Why does everything have to be "fun"? An activity can be good without being fun. Many of the best things we can do as humans are not fun at all and yet undeniably a good use of our time. I learnt the piano for 20 years and not a single one of the scales I played was "fun". I know an athelete who gets up every morning at 6am to run for an hour, rain or shine. She doesn't do it because it's fun, she does it because she wants something, and that's the way to get it. The end result is when we receive our deferred payment for our labours, be it being able to play any song we can imagine, run a triathlon, or admire our sparkling new web app. Whether the process was "fun" or not doesn't really enter into it. In fact, wilfully choosing to do things that aren't fun in pursuit of an abstract or distant goal is a hallmark of adulthood, IMO. I'm not saying I don't try to make the process as enjoyable as possible, of course. Just that I don't think programming is innately fun, nor do I care that it is not - one does what needs to be done. ~~~ cubicle67 Am I the only one here who derives a considerable amount of joy from the act of writing code? I've worked across a wide variety of languages and environments, including far more Access VBA than anyone should be exposed to (I loath Access more than any other environment ever), and yet, even here I love writing code. There's something amazingly zen about it; I _am_ the machine, corny as it sounds. It's where I am at peace. I don't know how to respond to people who see coding as merely an end to a means, except to say that that may be true for you, but for me it's far far more. ~~~ visitor4rmindia Same here - I enjoy programming. I'm passionate about it. I can relate very strongly to the OP. I program because I want to - because the very act gives me joy. I'm not crazy about debugging but it's a part of my craft and I even enjoy it sometimes. Sometimes, I still can't believe they pay me to do this! ~~~ blhack I love debugging...I even [sometimes] love debugging other people's code... Its a bit like being a kid, and going out exploring in the woods, or trying to figure out where your parents hid the christmas presents. Everything is new, and shiny (with other's code)...its fun seeing how other people do things... That and it is a puzzle. Doing stuff in the "real world" is boring, predictable. Doing stuff in code is fun. There are no "rules" really. The only limitation is how much yerba matte I can consume. ~~~ benmathes I like solving puzzles based on inherent complexity -- complications that arise in the data structures and algorithms of a piece of code. Any time spent fixing complexity layered onto the minimal complexity by confusing or poorly- factored code sucks. For example: I enjoy solving a performance issue by introducing a time/space tradeoff. I do _not_ enjoy fixing a bug where a previous coder (maybe me) misspelled a variable name once in a 6000-line function -- that's just cleaning up a mess, not problem solving. ------ c00p3r Man-Month is great book. Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained is the second one. But those are mostly about management of software projects. If you want to learn how to write good code you probably should read about how to write short stories and even Dale Carnegie's Speaking For Success. They are really useful. ------ erlanger Because it allows you to do a lot while moving very little.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Meet Mila, your smart Business Assistant - pstadler http://about.mila.com/ ====== mweibel Disclaimer: I'm working for this project. We're hiring passionate developers/engineers. Take a look at the Hiring Page: <http://about.mila.com/en/jobs/>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
American parenting is killing the American marriage (2014) - kareemm http://qz.com/273255/how-american-parenting-is-killing-the-american-marriage/ ====== Vexs While I think his insights on how we treat our children is amazingly insightful, and I love how it's described as a religion (the point that children are our sacred cows is very good in particular) his attempt to relate it to marriages seems shoehorned at best. There's a lot of problems with the way we treat children, but I think it's relation to marriage is the least of our issues. But seriously, the whole "children as a religion" point is great. I mean, think of some of the bills and laws that get passed because "think of the children". It's not too different from religious laws. ~~~ tinalumfoil I don't think he's being insightful at all. All his observations seem to be shallow and his conclusions are weak. > parenthood became a religion in America...Nothing in life is allowed to be > more important than our children...a human achieves its peak value at birth > and declines thereafter Most Americans tend to believe their children come first. This isn't a religion, it's an evolutionary instinct. A species can't continue if its organisms don't put enough effort into their offspring if their offspring are completely defenseless for the first decade of their life and only 3 are born to every female. If I kick a 40-year-old out of my house he'll find a hotel to stay at temporarily and be fine. If I dump a 2-year-old on the street, they'll be roadkill within the hour. Caring more about children isn't any more unique to this time period than it is to this species. > Another sign of the parenthood religion is that it has become totally > unacceptable in our culture to say anything bad about our children, let > alone admit that we don’t like them all of the time. I grew up in a household where my parents weren't afraid to tell the truth to me and it was pretty brutal. There's enough negativity at school that it feels like people are surrounding you at all sides with insecurities. Honesty isn't bad but if your kid goes to public school he already knows where he falls short. Also, saying things behind your kid's back isn't any better. It'll come back around to them. > Mothers are also holy in a way that fathers are not expected to be. Mothers > live in a clean, cheerful world filled with primary colors and children’s > songs, and they don’t think about sex. I don't know where this is coming from. Maybe this was Jesus' ideal for a mom, but nowadays the ideal mom seems to be one that argues over who's carpooling next week and buys their 16-year-old birth control just in case. I think anyone who can could and do laundry probably automatically counts as a good mother nowadays. I think the problem is the author treats kids more like a car than a living being. Your car's muffler isn't going to get fixed until you admit it's broken. You don't fix your kid by bringing him into the shop one day after work. Being a parent requires being a teacher, boss and friend at the same time. In no way is "owner" ever part of that definition. ~~~ discardorama > I don't think he's being insightful at all. All his observations seem to be > shallow and his conclusions are weak. Thank you; you put it better than I could. A small example that demolishes his crackpot theory: we just had a kid a few weeks ago. We have a cat, who has never been around children, and who has never had children. And yet, when the child cries, the cat comes running; and if the cries do not subside soon enough, she'll start howling. And then there's this example: [http://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-30893297](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30893297) Is the cat following some religion too? Hogwash. ------ rustynails This is both a great article and a mediocre article. I agree with others that the marriage aspect is the weakest part. As a parent, I constantly think back to the 70s as a benchmark for open mindedness and freedom with my children. In my honest opinion, we've lost a lot of perspective and become much less tolerant. In Australia, someone called the police because children walked a short distance to the local park by themselves. Taking a photo at a swimming carnival is taboo. None of these attitudes were around in the 70s. I felt the relationship aspects between adults missed the mark. Not only the relationship breakdown aspects, but the women and sex. That reminds me of the woman who runs she++ (a sexist business name that no one calls out) who said in a Forbes interview that sex was bad and a man thing. There is a social stigma in admitting that women can like sex. Even Sam Mechkovich from Ars commented about bond women not falling for bond in his Spectre review, because that's not a woman thing to like sex. My response to these people is "what's wrong with it?" Most of the women I know and respect are open about sex. That doesn't mean free sex, it means being open minded and confident in yourself to be free to speak your mind. My sort of people... Ultimately, I lump all these social and parental problems down to Political Correctness. For the nay sayers, you can treat people with respect and not be PC. PC is a set of perverted rules that bully people into what to think. ~~~ engi_nerd >> Ultimately, I lump all these social and parental problems down to Political Correctness. For the nay sayers, you can treat people with respect and not be PC. PC is a set of perverted rules that bully people into what to think. I have been told, "You can't say that, we have to be open minded here" when expressing the belief that political correctness does more to damage discourse than almost any other idea in western society. Way to provide a demonstration of my point! ~~~ disantlor Isn't the perverse fairness of giving equal time to clearly unequal opinions (/science/facts/etc) worse discourse than political correctness? Of course PC can and does wade into over sensitivity but it also includes the idea that you should err on the side of safety when using words that can be terribly hurtful to some people. It's not our place to decide that it's not in fact hurtful. ~~~ engi_nerd Yes, the idea that we must be fair to all opinions, no matter how silly, is also a bad one. ~~~ Lawtonfogle But it must be countered by the fact that some valid opinions of today were the silliest of the past. Consider how many things we accept as valid today (say opinions related to equality) were once almost blasphemous to mention. It would be arrogant of us to assume we are not making similar mistakes. ~~~ engi_nerd You raise a good point that I hadn't thought about. I suppose the lesson is to keep an open mind, but not so open that our brains fall out. ~~~ Lawtonfogle I'm just worried that among progressives of the past, many open minded positions of today would have been 'opening your mind til your brain fell out'. Consider what people would've said a century ago if you brought up homosexuals marrying or transsexual acceptance. What today seems a strange to use as those concepts seemed a to progressives a century ago? ~~~ engi_nerd Any ideas for how we can guard against this? ------ josephjrobison "Ayelet Waldman, where the author explained that she loved her husband more than her four children." Recently did some pre-marital counseling where they recommend that you put your spouse above your children. Seemed really strange to me and counter- intuitive. I don't know much about marriage at all, but if you think about it, the trickle-down effect does seem to make sense as setting an example is a good lesson for kids. I think the takeaway is to keep a balance. Also, it's not like Ayelet Waldman is a revolutionary, as other old-school practitioners seem to have been recommending that advice for years. ~~~ icanhackit _counseling where they recommend that you put your spouse above your children_ I believe this is incredibly important for a lasting, loving relationship. I've observed a few relationships where one partner's priority shifts so much to the children that the other partner is left with little love or consideration and their bond quickly degrades. I could understand this behavior in a place where there's a shortage of food and resources, but in developed countries with an abundance of food and relative safety people are sabotaging their happiness and adult bonds by elevating developing humans above the person they originally committed to. Additionally, some adults infantilize their household culture to the point where adult activities become a sort of taboo. I think we short-change children by not exposing them to regular adult behaviors and conversations. Certainly there are some things children should not be exposed to but the household should be as accommodating for old and young as possible. A healthy balance needs to be struck. ------ ajmurmann I never understood the sentiment of valuing babies over all else. To me it always seemed obvious that fresh college graduates are most valuable to society, since we just finished investing a ton of money into them. Babies on the other hand are easily replaced. I get this is mainly an emotional argument, but it's still startling to me how opposite it is to the purely economic argument I made above. In fact usually people think I'm just trolling when I'm stating my opinion on the matter but I'm dead serious. ~~~ nommm-nommm > fresh college graduates are most valuable to society This seems to be a popular opinion on here and I really don't understand that. In fact its kinda fucked up. I can only guess there's a lot of fresh college grads on HN. It takes all kinds to make the world go 'round. I certainly don't want a society made up of fresh college grads who think they know it all. ~~~ ajmurmann I strongly agree that we need a healthy mix. However, for fresh college graduates there is more time left to pay off the investment we made in them as a society. In fact I believe they will be at their most productive a little later than that. But they get there as they get older. Edit: Typos ~~~ nommm-nommm Meh... I don't think there is really much difference from your average fresh college grad and your average non-college educated 22 year old. I guess from an economical sense college is expensive but... I don't know... how many college grads actually use their degree? ~~~ nitrogen I think the more important question is how many college grads actually _benefit from_ their _education_ (modified words italicized). A degree in, say, forestry should still be useful for someone working in sales because of the experience dealing with diverse opinions, processing new information, and studying a range of subjects. ~~~ SOLAR_FIELDS This is anecdotal, and not a very controversial opinion, but many people in my family and group of friends are sociology majors. After watching them grow and knowing them pre and post degree, I can without a doubt say that education is beneficial. What you learn is unimportant. Becoming acquainted with the process of learning is the true benefit of education. ------ such_a_casual For anyone who's interested in the rise in divorce rates, I highly recommend the book "The Two Income Trap". It basically tries to prove that the transition to dual income households damaged the financial security of many families. Pair this with the fact that the number one cause of fighting and divorce is money, and you have a better explanation than what this article provides. ~~~ jseliger _I highly recommend the book "The Two Income Trap". It basically tries to prove that the transition to dual income households damaged the financial security of many families_ A great book. It can also be read profitably in conjunction with Matt Yglesias's _The Rent is Too Damn High_. School districts are weirdly tied to real estate in the U.S.; many places with good districts also have severe land-use control laws that prevent the creation of new housing units on a given parcel land; and, consequently, people will pay a lot of money for scarce housing that comes bundled with good school districts. Two-earner households make paying for the housing easier, but two-earner households are often also more economically fragile (especially considering the prevalence of divorce). ~~~ cesarbs > but two-earner households are often also more economically fragile Can you elaborate on that? It doesn't make sense to me. When we were on a single income in my family, it felt _a lot_ more fragile than now that we have two incomes. ~~~ such_a_casual It's explained in the book I mentioned. You would also need to educate yourself on personal finance by reading some other books to get a more holistic picture (The Millionaire Next Door is a good place to start). There's three things you need to understand about personal finance: 1\. The first is that shit happens and most people don't plan for it (because they haven't been educated on personal finance). Most resources suggest that you keep an emergency fund of 6-12 months of living expenses saved up for when shit happens. We know that most people do not have this. I'm not even going to bother providing a source because there are so many sources on how Americans don't save. 2\. The number one expense for any given household is going to be housing (whether owned or rented). 3\. While you can cutback on many things, you cannot cutback on a mortgage. So if there are permanent setbacks to your finances: someone loses their job and gets another one that pays less, someone gets hurt and can't work for a while or ends up on disability, someone has to stay home to take care of an unhealthy relative, etc, then you can be pretty much shit out of luck unless you're house has equity on it and you can sell and downsize (although most people will just take a loan out against their equity lol). So these are the characters of our stage. If you get a mortgage based on 1 person's income and something happens, there is another person there to step up. This provides a powerful safety net for the family. If you get a mortgage based on both people's incomes, you are putting yourself at greater risk because if something were to happen to either person you would not be able to afford to keep your 15-30 year agreement. And the cost of getting out of that agreement is enormous (as we saw with the recent housing crash). I encourage you to read more on personal finance. It's incredibly fascinating. ~~~ serge2k You realize the reason people move to 2 incomes is because they can't afford to live off one? You realize that a lot of people don't have savings because they live paycheck to paycheck trying to survive? ~~~ such_a_casual Both of your questions would be answered by reading the aforementioned books and by learning more about personal finance. Also: [https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance) ~~~ serge2k So no, and you will just continue with the condescending assumption that anyone questioning you doesn't know anything? ~~~ such_a_casual I'm not sure how you would like me to answer false assertions? Especially since my post is clearly about people with a mortgage (as is the book I recommended). The best I can do is point you in the right direction to properly educate yourself. ~~~ nommm-nommm Personal finance books are often a lot of garbage with a little bit of wisdom thrown in that requires effort to extract. [http://badmoneyadvice.com/2009/03/whats-wrong-with-the- milli...](http://badmoneyadvice.com/2009/03/whats-wrong-with-the-millionaire- next-door.html) ------ nommm-nommm Call me callous but I always thought one of the most important lessons a child should learn is "its not all about you." I am so amazed when I see parents nowadays devoting their entire life to making sure their children are spared of any tiny little inconvenience. These children will be very poorly adjusted and these parents are rarely happy. ~~~ javajosh What if you were to engineer a situation with your kids where you a) teach them how to do something useful, and then b) put them in a situation where that useful thing needs to be done. If they don't take the cue, no problem. If they miss it, maybe have a 3rd party (like an aunt or an uncle) pitch in. Then maybe have that 3rd party ask the child if they know how to do that thing - and get the kid to get in the habit of volunteering their effort if it's helpful to those around them. (It's important that the prompts not come from the parent since the action becomes "acquiescing to authority" instead of "pitching in for the common good".) Of course, there's an unfortunate prisoner's dilemma in that if two kids are involved, and one is volunteering all the time, the lazy one thinks, "Ha, sweet, I'm so clever I never do any work and things still get done!" Not really sure how to get around this - perhaps develop a turn-based cooperation game where two siblings take turns helping, effectively coopting the helpfulness of one to blunt the selfishness of the other. If they both defect, then I suppose you have to create an "existential baseline" that they don't want to endure, involving a) no toys, b) no freedom, c) bland food. But that's problematic because it turns you into a jailor, and it turns cooperation into "that thing you do to satisfy authority" again. ~~~ prawn Always going to great lengths to teach your children important lessons like this is another form of putting them first (or at least up there). I don't put loads of time into my kids to save them every inconvenience, but to give them a thirst for knowledge, etc. ------ yason Being a foreigner I do recognize the dynamic described in the article on some level, merely by observing the American culture from the outside, but I hadn't realized it's such a serious and pervasive sentiment——or is it? Maybe there's a bias such as the overmothering behaviour being overpresented in the media yet most families and mothers are absolutely regular people as parents, and possibly feeling bad themselves about never reaching the impossible expectations set in the media? I'd happily read personal experiences here to figure out how much truth there is in it. ~~~ mikeash Most of this article reads to me like a description of a foreign country, or an alternate universe. Maybe it is my own experience which is not representative, rather than the article, but I don't see parents having trouble criticizing their children when there's cause for it or admitting that they sometimes want to do things without their children. Most of the article is handwaving. The one part of it that's actually based on a specific event is the writer who got persecuted after saying she loved her husband more than her children. But this is the standard sort of nonsense that happens any time anything catches the attention of fringe crazies. Do something with national reach, and if 0.01% of your audience thinks you're a scumbag for it, you will suffer even if their opinion is not representative. You could write an essay about how chocolate is delicious and you'd still end up getting hated on, no doubt with lots of references to Indonesian fires and such. But there is no American chocolate crisis. ------ unabst 1) This comparison to me says more about religion than it does about parenting. Unconditional love and devotion to your baby? The feeling is physical, and the baby is real. To be able to invoke the same feelings for a deity appears more magical to me than parenting, especially for those who have never experienced having a child. 2) American parenting isn't killing marriage. Marriages are killed one at a time by the unique parents that choose to do so. And that's the problem with statistical conceptualizations. It rarely applies to you for those dealing with it at the present. Only in hindsight do the numbers compile anyway, so it really isn't all that helpful. Anyone in a marriage knows that the will to be together is sacrosanct. Once two capable independent adults decide to part ways, nothing could be easier. The past could have been wonderful, and it's easy to feel good about what was good. But for many couples, divorce is the choice, and often a good choice for them. In other cultures, there are more bonds holding couples together. In the US, it's far easier to be independent or marry again. It's easier to live your life on your terms than on that of social perception or social dogma. Is this a good thing? Who are we to judge? If you feel the stats are tilted in the wrong direction, then we can try and tip it the other way with our own marriages. But "for the stats" is not usually what crosses our minds when we're not getting along. This is a classic case of "is as does". Nothing is killing anything. This is the shape of the new American marriage. ~~~ douche I'm not so sure that "Once two capable independent adults decide to part ways, nothing could be easier." Particularly when children are involved, it can be very messy, very ugly, and ruinous for one or both parties, mentally and financially. Even in an ideal DINK relationship, depending on the state you live in, it can be difficult to come to a clean, amicable break, without ongoing obligations. It certainly is easier to live one's life on one's own terms. Indeed, that might be the _only_ way to live one's life, in the long term. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance when choosing a partner to make sure that both parties have compatible terms. ~~~ unabst It's true that having kids does make everything more complicated, and they provide a reason to stick together. But it isn't stopping parents from divorcing completely, just less than if they didn't have children. And seeing all of those divorced with children, it makes it more difficult, but not difficult enough. For better or for worse, we do it anyway. Of course, the opposite is also true. When two capable independent adults decide to stick together, there really isn't anything that could keep them apart. Isn't that the beauty of it? This has been at the heart of the western philosophy of marriage. ------ brazzledazzle I love my kids and I think they each have unique things about them that make them great. I also think they can be amazingly compassionate and caring little people. But let's be real: By and large kids are at least a little bit sociopathic assholes. It's that behavior that you spend the better part of their early lives trying to excise from them. Does anyone remember being a kid? Regardless of whether you were the victim, perpetrator, instigator or bystander just think back on how cruel bullies could be both verbally and physically. ------ martin1975 We've spared the rod for too long, IMHO. Not saying we should abuse our kids or even reprimand them physically necessarily, however seeing a two year old as anything more than a terrorist whom cannot be negotiated with, can have detrimental consequences in their adulthood. Boundaries must be drawn early on or else.... ~~~ vezzy-fnord Your statement is a performative contradiction. Your proposition is that a two-year old is akin to a terrorist who cannot be negotiated with, but your suggesting boundaries be drawn as a resolution presupposes that in fact they _can_ be negotiated with (negotiation necessarily implying the setting of boundaries), hence negating your point. ~~~ cwbrandsma Wait, are you saying you can negotiate with terrorist or with 2 year olds? I have no experience with terrorists, but I have five kids. There are absolutely times when a two year cannot be negotiated with. And there are times children have to be taught that under no uncertain times their current behavior is acceptable. And that time is a temper tantrum. ~~~ martin1975 I've 2 kids... and you catch my drift - they act (sometimes) like terrorists, and that is when you cannot negotiate, meaning, your word is absolute. Otherwise, any negotiation when they are acting like terrorists usually would end at their peril (yours too, probably), for they not know what they do. This is what I mean, "don't negotiate with terrorists". Of course, at other times you can negotiate, and they get the tradeoffs rather than being absolute in their attitude, sticking to their guns, without thinking. It is an ongoing commitment, a 'battle' of staying present, guiding them, drawing a line when necessary, and letting them win too... It is absolutely through contradictinction they will learn the most - what worked once, may or may not work again, behavior wise.... of course, there are absolutes - don't kill or hurt others, don't lie, cheat or steal...those are usually easier to teach. And then there's wisdom...that's lifetime learning. ------ __david__ It's just anecdotal, I've found that my siblings and friends with kids are pretty up front about the negative attributes of their kids. So the "parenthood religion" isn't necessarily universal. I think it's still a good article. It comes down to balance in the end, I think. Kids are just another thing in your life that you have to balance—more plates to spin. If you're only spinning your children's plates, it seems obvious that your job and relationship plates are going to eventually fall... ------ sakopov Marriage first, children second. If you and your wife/husband make a happy couple, you will likely raise a happy offspring by creating warm, healthy and balanced environment. ------ codinghorror This does seem a little extreme. I don't know many parents that are so child centric that they "have nothing left to say to each other". On the other hand if you compare parenting in th 1970s there does seem to be something to the argument that parenting went from an occupation to a professional sport, where people compete at it. I object more to the tiger parenting where kids have to be at the top of their class, get in to MIT or Stanford, all that pressure. It's not healthy. ------ gonyea I don't understand this at all. Blame divorce on kids? What? If anything, the American spending habits are killing the American marriage. Financial issues are the source of countless divorces. ------ HillaryBriss I always thought "Baby On Board" caution signs were placed on cars and minivans as a courtesy to other drivers. These signs let other motorists know that the sign-toting car will swerve wildly, stop unexpectedly and misbehave drastically because a self-centered, totally implacable baby is present inside, jealously and continuously demanding the driver's attention by screaming, vomiting and pretending to fatally gag on nothing in particular. Now I know I was wrong. Thanks HN! ------ ausjke read history boys at 18 or even younger can be generals and nowadays they're still treated like toddlers, our parenting method is wrong in my opinion, the key is that we babysit them too much for too long. ------ leroy_masochist I agreed with pretty much everything until the following: "Mothers are also holy in a way that fathers are not expected to be. Mothers live in a clean, cheerful world filled with primary colors and children’s songs, and they don’t think about sex. A father could admit to desiring his wife without seeming like a distracted parent, but society is not as willing to cut Ms. Waldman that same slack. It is unseemly for a mother to enjoy pleasures that don’t involve her children." Uh, are we living in the same society? Moms are more sexualized today than they ever have been. Have you ever been to a daytime CrossFit class? Lisa Ann has been the most popular adult film actress for years, for God's sake. I agree there is much progress yet to be made in resolving a variety of gender-equality issues....but the argument that society's increasing valuation of children is driving a newfound societal demand for Victorian prudishness in mothers seems to fly in the face of all available evidence. ~~~ deciplex I'm not sure your observation is at odds with the assertion made here. We could sexualize mothers while keeping the taboo on mothers themselves being sexual i.e. desiring sex. In fact, the sexualization could even feed off that very taboo. ~~~ leroy_masochist I see what you're saying in theory, but by my reading of the article it's clear that the authors are saying that societal expectations around mothering are effectively inhibiting women from existing both as mothers and as sexual beings -- and this assertion does not square with what I observe in the real world. ------ munin > child-centric lives can lose touch with one another to the point where they > have nothing left to say to one another when the kids leave home. there are couples like this because the way they made kids + 2 careers work on middle class salaries is by dividing the day in half and each parent spends one half the day with the children and the other works. after ten years of this, you don't actually know your spouse any more - they've been living some life, but not one that you've had time to be a part of between your own career and your children. this seems like an equally plausible explanation for this phenomenon, because when you sacrifice that much it must be for _something_ and when someone else insinuates that maybe the sacrifice wasn't worth it, well, that would really piss you off... ~~~ Jtsummers > the way they made kids + 2 careers work on middle class salaries is by > dividing the day in half and each parent spends one half the day with the > children and the other works. Who sets up their schedules like that in the middle class? Middle class jobs don't (typically) allow that one parent could work from 7-4 and another from 4-1am. ~~~ munin one parent does shift work and the other doesn't, i.e. medical residency / EMT or something in network operations that does a swing shift. ~~~ sokoloff That situation exists, but it seems far from the majority situation for 2-income middle-class households. ------ chefkoch An article about american parenting and a picture of new born babies in munich, germany? ------ ryanmarsh I would like to understand the relevance of this article to Hacker News. Perhaps it would be helpful if I could see a demographic breakdown of visitors: marital status, age, and number of offspring. "Once our gods have left us, we try to pick up the pieces of our long neglected marriages and find new purpose. Is it surprising that divorce rates are rising fastest for new empty nesters? Perhaps it is time that we gave the parenthood religion a second thought." So divorce rates for empty nesters are the kids fault or kids are holding together marriages that were doomed before they left the nest? This article is garbage. ~~~ serge2k Anything is relevant to Hacker News. It's in the rules. ------ sdegutis He's generalizing way too much. There are so many different subcultures, which each have their own style of parenting, and even within them parenting varies person to person too much to generalize like this. ------ vlehto >The origins of the parenthood religion are obscure "The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits any United States citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex. It was ratified on 1920." Womens suffrage has to reverb through political sphere. As a whole it's not good or bad, just different. Another thing coming from there: time passed since women gained vote seems to correlate with welfare spending. I don't think religious fervor can be avoided in a society. It's just a matter of where it is directed. ------ pravka This _is_ extreme. I read this article when it made the rounds last year, and I hated it just as much this time around. Disclaimer: I'm a parent, and I love it. I also love being in a relationship with someone I trust and with whom I can talk about 'grown-up' shit. Granted, there are definitely parents who hover, worry, or interfere with their kids', but, at least in the circles I run in, these are the exception more than the rule and most certainly don't represent parents (or marriages) at large. ------ curuinor A. Teller is probably more interesting to HN folks because he's head of Google X. This seems incongruous a little bit and then you see how people in Palo Alto parent... ~~~ jessaustin This is related to the "obnoxious Little League Dad" phenomenon. Most of us have some disappointments about our lives. The way that some parents deal with those is to imagine that their children will succeed where they have failed. Once parents pay more attention to the image of a child than to the actual child, craziness ensues. ------ eximius Interestingly, I've asked many of my female friends, including my last few girlfriends, given the hypothetical choice of saving their husband or their child, who would they save? Almost all of them said their children. Ask the men, however, and it is almost always the wife. And none of these folks were married or had kids yet. It is something ingrained from before that occurs. ~~~ jpfed Dad here. I would save the kids, for several reasons: 1\. They have more life-years ahead of them. 2\. If I saved my wife, she would hate the choice I made and be plagued by survivor guilt or resentment. It's not clear that my marriage would survive this. But the kids are young enough that they would probably accept the choice, to the extent that they could comprehend it. ------ vezzy-fnord Not every day you see a major publication questioning natalism. See also Judith Rich Harris' _The Nurture Assumption_ : [http://www.amazon.com/The-Nurture-Assumption-Children- Revise...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Nurture-Assumption-Children- Revised/dp/1439101655) ------ draw_down Being a parent today seems so awful, especially if you are expected to make the household income on top of doing 50% of the parenting. ------ doctorstupid I have a suspicion that these parents are using children as mirrors for their self-obsessions. The self is the true religion here. ------ bsder Hmm, wouldn't have expected "But think of the chiiiiildren" to be a shitty argument even when applied to marriage. ------ dba7dba If this article were true, how can you explain lower divorce rate in Asian countries? China? S Korea? Japan? ~~~ ryuker16 Divorce rates skyrocketed when they started having dual incomes like ours. The reason for less is cultural....plus, it's a bit easier to cheat and still stay married....most places aren't so hung up on "he cheated, let's divorce!" thing like the USA. ~~~ dba7dba So it wasn't because of over parenting in Asia? ------ programminggeek Perhaps replacing real religion with a false one is unwise. ------ hosh This isn't a bad train of thought, though I wonder if this says more about Millennial narcissism than it does about the "religion of parenting". I think this has more to do with a kind of ethical posturing ("I am holier than thou") than it is about a sacred cow. There are parents who will give up their own interests for the sake of their children's interest, and not because there is peer-pressure to do so, or as a way to gain status within the community, or to be tyrannized by a cultural myth. So thinking about it more, I think this article is BS -- not because the issues it raises are not true, but because it focused on the wrong thing. There is also a spiritual and psychological transformation that takes place with becoming a parent. Philosopher Ken Wilber had written extensively about modernity, and the way it throws pre-modern ideas such as the Great Chain of Being out the window, leaving members of modernity disconnected with their place in the universe. That's not to say that pre-modern ideas where they just told you where your place is a good idea. On the other hand, existential angst and a constant wondering of your place in society, in the world, in the universe as a whole is a constant them in the cultures of modernity. What does this have to do with parenting? The idea of the Great Chain of Being is a kind of stand-in, or abstractions, that Ken Wilber claims ties the pre- modern religion together. They disagree on a lot of things, but one thing that is present in the religious teachings is putting the human experience in context of the cosmos as a whole. The search for the meaning of life was a search for your origins, of where you came from -- a search for who you were "born" from. It might seem obvious that your body was born from the DNA of both of your parents; however, where did they come from? If you trace things up your lineage, you still come to the question, "Where did life originate from?" To use the mythic language in the context of the Great Chain of Being, you were "born" from the universe. To become a parent is to experience -- just a little bit -- of what it is like for the universe to give life and creation. It might be accidental or intentional. Someone might enter this stage with naivete or with great wisdom. There are a lot of things you might have railed against growing up, but now as a parent, it makes you think and wonder. My point is that, if you were to strip away the ethical posturing and political correctness, what you are left with is not a re-examination of parenting, that there is a sacred cow to be slaughtered. Parenting is an re- examination of your self and your place and purpose within the universe. Your growth does not stop there. You might gain a better appreciation of how things come together. ------ swagv "Think of the children" is a cliché	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN : What print magazines do you still subscribe to? - kqr2 Given the demise of Dr. Dobbs, just curious what print magazines people here still subscribe to?<p>I subscribe to Circuit Cellar and Make Magazine. ====== burrokeet I still love magasines- no iTablet to read on the toilet yet... Wired Billboard Urb The Beat Vibe Fader when I'm in the US or UK I also usually grab a few things at the bookstore: Wallpaper Mix UK Future Music ------ Hates_ The Week Evo Fast Company (I regret renewing last year) Pick up occasionally: The Economist Monocle ------ gaius * Black and White Photography * Runner's World * England Rugby * Sport Diver ------ joubert 1) New York Magazine 2) Details ------ pclark The Economist ------ jgrahamc The Economist ------ NonEUCitizen Make Magazine ------ medianama None ------ dantheman reason	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Some Thoughts on the Cost Disease - dsr_ http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/331 ====== marchenko This article also hints at one of the reasons why humans chafe at economic inequality, and a rising tide lifting all boats is not enough to produce utopia: there are some resources - desirable reproductive partners, status, land (esp. near others of high status) - which do not become more widely available as prosperity increases. The pursuit of these goods can even become more immiserating in a society with large differences in relative status, as the coveted attention of others flocks to global superstars rather than local stars. The author shows that these approximately zero-sum goods can be largely reduced to "attention". ~~~ meric And if we assume attention is valuable, while everything else is valueless, we've been pretty good at destroying what's valuable for what's valueless in the past century. Some of us pour our attention into games and movies instead of sharing it with those close to us. Some of us pour our attention into hour long commutes where we spend our utmost effort not to give attention to anyone near us - it might make them uncomfortable. Some of us pour our attention on those who already have a lot of it, who cannot possibly return it to us - famous youtube personalities, celebrities, porn stars even. We spend our time fine-tuning our processes to be as "efficient" as possible, from the queue in the supermarket, to the queue in the fast food restaurant, to reduce our shopkeepers and waiters to mere actors following a script efficiently, and in some cases, completely replace them with machines. We make our workplace a place where colleagues gather for majority of their lives, but make it difficult to form enduring long term friendships. We spend lots of time worrying about economic inequality but much less time about attention inequality. The only relevant policy we do have is subsidised psychologic care. It's inhumane to deny human food, that's why we provide welfare. It's inhumane to neglect a child's need for parental love, which is why we place orphans in foster homes (not perfect). And what about adults, what do we do about attention inequality in terms of family, friendship, and sexual partners? We just sort of leave it up to them to figure it out, and then when we read about suicides in the paper, we write a comment "if you feel this way please seek help immediately". This is a summary of what I find wrong about modern society, and I have no solution besides enjoying the giving of time to those close to me when they ask for it. We've become a lot more efficient trading away our attention for physical goods that don't really matter to us except to trade in a zero sum game for more attention. ~~~ dsjoerg I'm excited to see the phrase "attention inequality". I've had similar thoughts for a few years and suspect that's a fertile line of inquiry. I haven't gotten far enough along in thinking about it to say anything very clear, but I think the relationship between our attitudes about wealth inequality vs attention inequality is important and telling. To many who don't think deeply, wealth inequality is terrible while attention inequality is natural and no big deal. The two kinds of inequality cause each other, which is also interesting. But mostly I'm interested in how our attitudes about one kind can or cannot, must or must not, apply to the other. EDIT: To circle back to your point, I disagree that attention can be "destroyed". I prefer to say that attention can never be destroyed, only shifted from one thing to another. So if you are ignoring your family and playing video games, you have not destroyed your attention, you have instead shifted it to the video game (and its creators). ~~~ meric True, everyone has 24 hours a day, though what I really mean is the utility of that attention can be destroyed - the utility of 10 hours of your attention for the video game creator is measured in tens of dollars but could be priceless to your children. And I'm happy you are excited to see this phrase. :-) ------ NLips The whole chicken / beef thing has been misunderstood by the author - chicken was never the expensive alternative to beef. The author seems to have been masively misled by the (false) quote of Hoover "a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage". Hoover never said this. My best reading of the history seems to be: 16th century: (Henry IV) "If God keeps me, I will make sure that no peasant in my realm will lack the means to have a chicken in the pot on Sunday!" 1928: (Hoover) "The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail to the full garage." 1928: (Republican campaign flyer) Title "A Chicken for Every Pot", text includes "Republican properity has... put the proverbial 'chicken in every pot'. And a car in every backyard, to boot." It's clear that in 1928 chicken wasn't an the indicator of wealth that the author things; it was (as the flyer says) proverbial. ~~~ NLips For reference, the 'smell test' that lead to me thinking twice about this is the energy cost. Small animals don't have to live as long to reach full size, so you don't need to spend as much energy (food) keeping the existing mass of the animal alive while it's growing new mass. That's why (very roughly) the cost of common farmed meat is normally chicken -> pork -> beef. ~~~ vilhelm_s It seems the main reason chicken was expensive was that it was seasonal and labor-intensive. Someone on reddit writes: > Chicken, and eggs, were until the mid-20th century, a seasonal food. Chicken > more than a year old is very tough, requiring hours of roasting or boiling > to get a fairly tasteless end result. Most chickens lay their eggs in the > spring and summer, petering out over the year. Old recipe books will have > different instructions for "December" versus "April" eggs, given the quality > of the yolks, which didn't used to be the uniformly pale color that > industrial eggs look like now. So when the eggs would hatch, the young males > would be culled and eaten right away by households, but the variety of cuts > were few and the market to sell chickens incidental. Let's fast forward to > the twentieth century. Unlike cows and pigs, who are irregular but large, > chickens resisted the assembly line innovations of industrial production > because they were irregular and small, which means they needed lots and lots > of labor to process them. ([https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o72to/how_d...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o72to/how_did_chicken_beef_and_pork_become_the_three/ccqd3fu/)) ------ im3w1l "As the only thing that can be expensive in the final Strong Heaven, attention predictably gets more expensive in a culture that moves more and more toward general post-scarcity. " So the world's first profession would also be its last. How fitting. ------ dsr_ The key sentence, for me: "The pattern of Cost Disease seems to be related to things that inextricably require the unsubstitutable labour and attention not just of human beings but of human beings somehow comparable to the buyer." ~~~ kalleboo It doesn't explain the insane cost increases in the US though, if you follow the links on Cost Disease in the OP, there are sources that show only minor increases in salaries (the cost of labor) [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on- cost-...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost- disease/) It also doesn't explain that _only_ the US has these insane cost increases. It all comes down to the weird political and regulatory climate in the US. You can't draw any conclusions on the broader human condition based on such an outlier country. ~~~ fanzhang It's often cited that in Europe the sticker prices of both healthcare and education are lower. However that's because most of it is being subsidized by the state; it would be interesting to see whether the total societal costs are similarly rising everywhere for a comparable education or comparable healthcare (e.g. ER visit for broken arm). ~~~ Symmetry No, the figures Scott cited include state subsidies. It's indicative that Britain, spending the same amount of money divided by total population, can provide healthcare to everyone for the same amount of money the US spends on Medicaid and Medicare for providing it for just the old and poor. ------ zkms I feel like a nontrivial root cause of cost disease is USian land use restrictions that make real estate pathologically expensive. The devastating effects of bad zoning policies end up severely driving the cost of real estate -- and real estate prices, both for housing and business/industry, end up affecting a whole lot of operational expenses for both employees and corporations (which then in turn affects prices). (It's not just simply "regulatory burden" in general (except maybe healthcare) as explained in [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on- cost-...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost- disease/) \-- there's hella many industries and services and goods affected by cost disease, and the regulatory burdens too much to be a root cause -- real estate / housing costs is a more likely common cause) ~~~ JumpCrisscross > _USian_ Is this a regional thing (Assuming it's a synonym for American. Google tries to correct me to Usain Bolt, then brings up a page of Usian Bolt typos.) ~~~ CalRobert USian is a term adopted by English speakers who wish to more clearly distinguish between things related to the United States (the political entity), and things related to the Americas (the geographical entity(ies)). Motivations can range from a desire for precision in speech to a recognition that claiming the term "America" for one country, when in fact it is two continents with dozens of countries, isn't terribly considerate. People from Canada, Mexico, and Chile can all legitimately say they are "American", just like both Germans and Spaniards are "European", but using the term extensively to mean "people or matters related to the US" makes this less viable. Note that in Spanish the term Estadounidense (note the similarity to "Estados Unidos") exists, though I don't know how much it's used. Of course, it's an uphill battle, especially when you consider that the official name for Mexico is Estados Unidos Mexicanos. ~~~ aninhumer I'm not really sure I see the point. If you want to refer to the two continents, you can say "The Americas". ~~~ CalRobert The point is that saying someone or something is "American" shouldn't cause one to assume it's from or of the US. ~~~ zeveb > The point is that saying someone or something is "American" shouldn't cause > one to assume it's from or of the US. That's seems like it's a pretty silly sentiment, since in common English speech that's _exactly_ what 'American' implies. As you yourself note, USian could just as easily refer to someone from the United States of Mexico. I personally think it'd be salutary for our republic if my fellow Americans would refer to themselves as New Yorkers, Californians, Georgians, Texans &c. rather than as Americans (just as Germans, French, Dutch, Danish refer to themselves), but that's a different discussion altogether. ~~~ CalRobert I actually prefer to call myself Californian in most contexts. I also think the word "state" is diluted by the US. Anyway, I'm not really advocating for one side or the other. In common usage "American" definitely relates to the US most of the time. I can understand the annoyance of people from other American countries, though. Surely Nigerians, Eritreans, etc. would have a reason to be frustrated if "African" came to refer particularly to "South Africa" and not to the continent. ------ jwatte The title of the blog is "people before ..." And the writer doesn't understand the social signaling of clothing? Like, at all? First, clothing is really personal, and funding a second skin that "suits me" and "fits me" requires much wider selection than a rack of time socks can supply. Second, anyone with a social job that depends on status, or who is in the marriage/mate market, or who works in a job that may wear on clothing but still needs to be presentable, will need more than a few hundred dollars a year for clothing budget. "The cost disease of the service sector" is a well known economic theory (I leaned it in economics 101 in the '90s) and the real insight should probably be that, as we get better at making stuff, the scarce resource becomes educated human time, but we are still locked in a value model that mainly measures "stuff." Once robots make all the stuff for basically free, we have to totally change how our society operates its economy. That's fairly close in time, yet nobody is really even making up the words we'll use to talk about the issue yet. ~~~ douche Thank flying spaghetti monster I work in a profession where you can get by on free conference t-shirts and a couple new pairs of jeans a year. ~~~ Tycho Why do you need new pairs of jeans every year? I don't think I've ever had to discard jeans except from growing out of them. They are made of tough material. ~~~ Amezarak Maybe you're buying better jeans than I am. After about a year mine develop holes in the seat, particularly around the pockets. Sometimes they get torn before that, if I get wet and then get them caught on something. ~~~ throwanem Tears are easily stitched or patched. Pockets coming apart is trickier; restitching over a patch of strong material can work, but only for a while, and more of the fabric disintegrates every time they come apart again. And, no, you needn't, and it is inarguably more efficient of time just to buy a new pair. But it can be a pleasant hobby, and I think that as much as anything proves the original article's point. ------ skywhopper Health care is a pretty simple one to explain. In addition to the fact that technology doesn't bring massive productivity increases to a field that requires human-to-human interaction, the fact is that health care today is a much much more extensive undertaking than it was 50 years ago. We have much better drugs, much better treatments, and much better diagnosing tools. There's also the paradox that better health care means longer lifespans which means greater health care expenses. When chronic conditions can be managed instead of quickly becoming terminal, that's a win, but it also means that the health care costs for that human go way way up. There's corruption, rent- seeking, patent abuse and monopoly effects, too, of course, not to mention a balkanized health insurance market. But the basic fact is that we get a lot more from health care industry than we ever did in the past, so you'd expect that that portion of the economy would be much bigger than it ever was. ~~~ 3pt14159 Plus a large portion of the public in America doesn't pay for healthcare directly (they either get employer-based health insurance or declare bankruptcy) so it distorts incentives while retaining the profit motive. Furthermore American society is seemingly setup to avoid exercise and healthy foods at any cost. The Japanese are just as wealthy, older, and they smoke more, but they have better health outcomes and they spend almost a third per capita on healthcare. Chile spends about a ninth on healthcare and their average life expectancy is a full year more than the USA. On top of all of this is the fact that people can get into debt at 1% interest. Hard to be cost-conscious when dear old gran needs a $20k (only $50 per month!) treatment to live another three months. Same thing happened to education. ~~~ specialist Key part about that _distortion_ is that it hides the rent seeking. ~~~ 3pt14159 The rent seeking of drug companies and over-regulation? ~~~ specialist Forgive me, I'm unclear how we went from insurance company malfeasance to regulatory capture by Big Pharma. ------ jaggederest I think it's interesting to think about it in terms of a shift of the theory of value from subjective to objective: considering things like education in terms of objective value, you can just total up their cost in hours of people's lives, rather than trying to consider them purchased on a market. Or, if you prefer, fixing the basis for pricing on the effort involved rather than the exchange value. ------ lmm > Yes, that's Haruhi Suzumiya. But it's also someone in a much older franchise > you might have heard of. Let's not be coy. Does the author mean God here? Or something else? ------ uiri Meta comment: "bc.ca" is one of those along with "co.uk", "co.jp", etc. where anyone can register a third-level domain underneath it. The domain for this submission really should be sooke.bc.ca ~~~ schoen The HN code should import and use the Public Suffix List or a library that can make use of it. [https://publicsuffix.org/learn/](https://publicsuffix.org/learn/) ~~~ teddyh Yes. I suggested it two years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8911044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8911044) ------ guard-of-terra There exist some SF set in Strong Heaven, but it's mostly written in Russian :) ~~~ throwanem Here's a bit that is not: [http://localroger.com/prime- intellect/](http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/) I found it not wholly unsatisfactory, although a bit rough in spots - on the other hand, it both prefigures and subverts the Rapture of the Nerds _avant la lettre_ , so I'd be willing to excuse quite a bit more than is actually required. Definitely worthwhile, especially if you also found the whole "Singularity" thing grating.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to choose colours everyone likes - juliang http://www.creativepro.com/article/how-choose-colors-everyone-likes ====== jacobolus This is bogus. Basically the popular combinations are "liked" because (a) they are colorful, and (b) they have value (lightness) contrast, whereas the others are both less colorful, and also have low value contrast. Completely removing the color information from these suggested schemes reveals that value contrast alone accounts for nearly all of the suggested effect. It's easier to make combinations that satisfy conditions a and b using light yellow and dark red or blue, etc., ... but all the part about picking colors that "shift in accordance with the natural brightness" is nonsense. (I can pick colors that shift "opposite the natural brightness" which look just as good.) Anyone wanting to really understand color should hit the books, or—if confined to the internet—should take a look at <http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/wcolor.html> and in particular this page: <http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color11.html> ~~~ jacobolus For those who don't believe me, here's an explicit graphical rebuttal to the article: <http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/ycnews/nonsense.png> ~~~ jcromartie I actually find the original palettes to be more pleasing than your reconstructed ones due to the hue shift. I can't help but go with what my eyes are telling me. ~~~ sp332 The original idea is that the ones on the left are uglier than the ones on the right because of their brightness. The rebuttal switches the brightness levels, which results in the _same progression_ , from ugly to less ugly. ------ run4yourlives You know, out of all the things a new start-up has to worry about, picking the right colours is down there with ensuring scalability to amazon levels in terms of priority. I've been around the web for close to 15 years now, and all I can say is that the only constant is you will not get consensus on matters of creative taste. This is a fruitless exercise to occupy your time with, IMO. ~~~ psranga Interesting. I thought the color scheme was very important because you only get 30 seconds or so to convince a first-time user to stay for the 31st second. ~~~ patio11 This is true, except the actual number is a lot closer to 3 than 30. ------ stevejalim I'm quite a fan of <http://kuler.adobe.com/> for colour schemes - hit the slider controls icon to get to the good stuff, where you can apply one of six rules to help you select related colours ------ foulmouthboy Another way to say this is, "How to cater to the lowest common denominator". ~~~ SwellJoe I've had more than the usual number of opportunities to trot out this quote lately: "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." - H.L. Mencken	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Help foil the NSA by Encrypting Google Drive - SilliMon http://www.syncdocs.com/keep-google-drive-files-private-with-syncdocs-encryption/ ====== CPAhem With the news that the NSA is tapping Google's internal fibre links, local encryption of Google is the way to go. The problem is that it makes it harder to use, and to share, especially on multiple devices. Perhaps the innocent days of the early Internet are over, and we now always need to consider that Big Brother is watching. ~~~ DanBC > Perhaps the innocent days of the early Internet are over, and we now always > need to consider that Big Brother is watching. You have _always_ had to assume that your data is available to Big Brother. ~~~ SilliMon No, in the past, only if you were a tin-foil hat wearing paranoid. We expected our government to uphold the law, specifically the 4th Amendment, which protects us from unlawful searches. ~~~ DanBC ECHELON was an open secret, with EU parliament reports. We knew how the 5 members avoided the legal problems of spying on their own citizens - A just hands B, C, D and E a list of names to spy on. Here's a report from 2000 ([http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/820758.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/820758.stm)) Here's a report from 2001 ([http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/may/29/qanda.janeperro...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/may/29/qanda.janeperrone)) Risk assessment has always been part of cryptography.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why SQL Sucks for NoSQL Unstructured Databases - dscape http://writings.nunojob.com/2011/06/why-sql-sucks-for-nosql-unstructured-databases.html ====== favd44 Great article!!! ... and I agree. I work for IBM, and I dealt with SQL/XML before ... and I still agree with the article. Thanks. ------ datagirl What's better than SQL then?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Amazon.com and The Atlantic Will Sell Short Stories on the Kindle - byrneseyeview http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/books/05fiction.html ====== waterlesscloud $3.99 each. Gonna have to lower that price point a little. Too many people with their hands in the till. ~~~ anigbrowl Agree...but it strikes me that there's an opportunity here for lovers of genre fiction. Mystery and Sci-fi magazines used to provide both a platform and a means of earning a living for new authors, but in recent years readership of literary periodicals has fallen. I would not pay $3.99 for a novella (and I'm old-fashioned enough to prefer paper when it comes to reading for pleasure) but I might consider $5 once every month or two for a bunch of short stories.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Don't like Brexit? We have a plan - beniaminmincu http://www.transylvaniabeyond.com/ ====== lemiant This is really cool and well done. I'm unhappy with the stats they chose though. I thought that 20x less robberies seemed unlikely so I clicked their source. They were using the absolute number of robberies not per capita. The way they used it is sneakiness bordering on outright lies. This kind of bad-faith abuse of stats always irritates me. ~~~ terminalcommand And not all robberies and thefts are reported to /recorded by the police. There are vast differences between countries in those numbers. On the other hand, the car theft numbers is probably accurate, because people need to report to get insurance. ------ NWDrew72 Let's break down the modern, flashy PR move and check some reality: LGBT rights in Romania (from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Romania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Romania)) \- Decriminalized in 1996 \- Gender identity: change of legal sex allowed since 1996 \- Discrimination protections: protections since 2000 (still don't national ones in the U.S.) \- No marriage \- No civil unions \- Adoption HAAAHAHAAH cmon be serious LGBT rights in the UK (from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_King...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Kingdom)) \- Decriminalized in the 60s - 80s, way before 1996 \- Gender identity: change of legal sex allowed since 2005, way after Romania \- Discrimination protections: protections since 2010, way after Romania \- Civil unions in 2005 \- Marriage in 2014 \- Adoption since 2005 / 2013 ~~~ vassy It's very easy for an outsider to judge it like that. You can't compare the UK with an ex-communist, very religious country. These things can't really change overnight, it takes a few generations. So yeah, I wouldn't advise any gay people to go to Romania. ~~~ woodpanel I echo that. Also, I'm pretty sure that even in such an "ex-communist, very religious country" there are LGBTs and areas (probably Bucharest) where LGBTs are rather accepted. If de-jure-acceptance instead of just de-facto is a dealbreaker for you I suggest come back in a couple of years/decades :-( ------ apopa116 In Romania, companies which have under 100.000 euro / year income are called microenterprises. Microenterprises have an income tax of 3% which should be paied quarterly. If they have at least one employee, the tax is 2%. If they have at least 2 empoyees, the tax is 1%. The tax on dividends is 5% and IT specialists are free from salary taxes. We moved our headquarters to Bucharest in Q1/2014, but this autumn the team is moving to Sibiu, Transylvania! Glad to be here :-) ~~~ woodpanel This is actually the information I missed on their website. Could you elaborate on... ... did you move there from outside of Romania? ... if so, how did you incorporate there? Did you gave your BV/GmbH/Ltd/SA just another address or created a new company there, that then bought 100% of your old shop? ~~~ apopa116 We're from the US and were looking for promising European land. No, we incorporated a brand new company(WELOVEHN SRL) not to hassle with bureaucracy. Which is cool from an administrative point of view. Romanian lawyers seem to be fluent in English and we still maintain a productive collaboration. ~~~ woodpanel Thanks for your reply! Do you manage from abroad or did you personally relocate as well? Hope your move proves to be a success! ~~~ apopa116 A quarter of our team was working remotely from Romania, so we decided to relocate. I had plans to go back to CA as soon as everything was in place, but for a while I wanted a vacation... Then it felt wrong to leave and I remained in charge. I'll be back, maybe to get more of my friends in Transylvania with me :-) ------ jstoja I just find this initiative mind-blowing. In Western Europe, Eastern part has quite of a bad reputation, especially on subjects like safety or development. I've recently heard about several good opportunities there and this makes me even more curious about Romania. ~~~ Fuxy I Grew up in Transylvania and just took one of my friends with me when I was going back for a short vacation he loved it. We actually took the budget flight from London to Cluj and the bus to my home- town it was a but dangerous at the bus terminal since that's where gipsies hang out to rob you but if you are careful you should be ok plus there's a lot of people around so they can't afford you making a scene or the security will kick them out. All the other places we went to were quite safe an entertaining. Mind you I'm a local so I know what places to avoid to not get into trouble so there's that too however most places are quite safe anyway. If you avoid bad neighbourhoods and some transport hubs with bad security you shouldn't have any problems. ------ mariusmg "Surprisingly high quality of life" Nope (i'm from Romania). I like the "presentation" overall but some things are stretched to the limit there :) ~~~ vertis Care to elaborate on where this website is inaccurate? ~~~ mariusmg Sure, here's my own personal opinion about some of them : -Probably the most spectacular nature in Europe Romania IS a beautiful country (in a old fashion kind of way) but i really double it that anyone who traveled around Europe a bit would say it has "most spectacular nature". Dunno, go to Faroe Island (as a example) and tell me afterwards how "most spectacular" is Transylvania. -The largest number of tech specialists in the EU That is actually the most misleading part though. Not sure if RO has the largest number or not but a potential investor should be aware that most tech specialist are actually located in Bucharest not Transylvania. And the gap in salary requirements/ skills between the 2 is actually pretty big (Bucharest >>> Transylvania). Heck until a few years ago Bucharest was the only IT "hub" in RO. -Excellent private healthcare system Yes and no. If you have a serious health problem , you'll get "shipped" to a state hospital and those are bad. -Some of the greatest festivals in Europe Guess it also depends on music genres. I'm into metal , for instance, and the metal festivals in RO are definitely not "greatest". It's not like we have Wacken here. ~~~ apopa116 I fell in love with Romania mainly because of the people. You won't find other people being so grateful just because you say hi. Next, the nature: sure, Ko Samui is heavenly, but I'm more into `vampiric` landscapes. We opted for private healthcare(look into "Queen Mary" \- this is what you'd choose). I don't know about public healthcare and I don't really care :-) There are two big festivals somewhere near us: Untold and Electric Castle. I'm a metalhead too, but Armin van Buuren, Tiesto or Faithless really sound good! Regarding the number of IT specialists, just read the reports. It's a fact that they have lower salary expectations, but they're hard workers who eventually end up in the US. This is why the author of the website is calling for entrepreneurs. Have a read: [http://teamfound.com/blog/romania-it-industry- report/](http://teamfound.com/blog/romania-it-industry-report/) ------ davb This site is pretty broken on latest stable Chrome on Android. As soon as I start scrolling I see solid white or grey blocks. Sometimes, at certain scroll heights, I see some text. But mostly I can't actually read the content. ~~~ pmontra It's worse with Firefox. Scrolling is much less smooth but at least I can read a little more text (instead of Chrome I used Opera.) ------ bewo001 Yeah, let's move to a corrupt homophobic country. [http://www.transparency.org/cpi2015](http://www.transparency.org/cpi2015) rank 58 on the corruption index (behind greece and ghana), [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Romania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Romania) 54% of Romanian interviewed stated they would never have a meal with a homosexual. 53% preferred that homosexuality be outlawed. 79.7% of those questioned would not want a homosexual neighbor ------ dingo_bat UK is the second largest economy in Europe. That fact is not going to change just because they no longer count themselves in Europe. If transylvania is a good place to open an office, it is as good as it has already been. Brexit shouldn't influence anyone based in London to move to transylvania. ~~~ russelluresti Did the UK fall below France? So third largest? ------ Artlav That's odd. First they try to close borders to migrants, and now they welcome migrants? How is that supposed to work? ~~~ sampo They closed borders to migrants who were not likely to set up tech startups. They try to lure migrants who are likely to set up tech startups. ------ mgalka Transylvania just earned my respect ------ neil_s Haha this is amazing! We were already considering moving into a cheaper part of Europe when we got focused on coding rather than BD, this just makes our decision a bit easier ------ woodpanel I like the advertising. I like the timing. But what I like most is that they have the urge to tackle their future. Without any restraints to make jokes about themselves to tackle something else: The backwater stereotypes. This far, I've heard only good things from that area. From people who worked or studied there. What I'd expect but didn't see: Is the tax-system competitive? How about the other performance indicators regarding incorporation, labor costs and legal certainty? ~~~ apopa116 To answer you tax question, check my previous comment. As for performance indicators, I quote: "Romania will be an economic growth outperformer in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in 2016, and the second fastest growing EU economy (behind Ireland)."([http://www.bmiresearch.com/romania](http://www.bmiresearch.com/romania)). Also low labor costs, ferm legislation. ------ justinlardinois Why are they advertising it as Transylvania, rather than Romania? > Romania is 1st in Europe in terms of number of certified IT specialists. The > number of engineers per capita in Romania is greater than in the US, India, > China, or Russia I've heard anecdotally that tech industry pay is awful in Romania compared to the rest of Europe. Perhaps the high number of tech workers is the reason? ------ NullCharacter I'd totally move to Transylvania. Wonder if I can still work remotely from there... I mean they're only 11 hours ahead of PST. ~~~ apopa116 We're a cyber security company and moved to Romania because around 1/4 of our employees were Romanians working remotely with us. Sure, if you are willing to work from home you can find a job anywhere it's available. ------ vlunkr Ha! That was brilliant. I'm glad the mentioned vampires, because sadly that is about the only thing I know about Transylvania. ------ srott The nature is really nice and food is great. But I've been robbed there... And the way how they achieve the fastest internet connection is really ugly -- cables are hanging from everywhere, historical building or not, it's really touch to take a photo without cables. Just google for Cluj cables ------ dyadic This is pretty and all, but it just seems like an opportunistic ad by the tourist board of Transylvania. If freedom of movement between the UK and the rest of Europe is lost by Brexiting, and they're still willing to accept Brits then I'll be impressed. ------ bronz this is silly. its a good place to move because its start up friendly? thats nice and all but its hardly relevant to the vast majority of the population. i will admit though that most of the people who are so worried about brexit that they would move to another country are in the age range and socioeconomic bracket from which most start up people emerge. by the way can anyone list some of the reasons why leaving the eu will be a disaster? i dont know anything about the eu. ------ simonturvey As a Brit I'd just like to say that _that_ is how a country should grasp an opportunity. Rather than the bitchy whining I've seen from many of my compatriots so far! ------ reacharavindh Now that's a way to learn about a country I did not know much about. Great impression in my mind! Sounds too good to be true though. Any true experiences here in HN? ------ zaro Haha.. Funny, I just moved out of there . ~~~ movedx How come? Anything we should know? ------ hiven I think it's a great idea ------ ank_the_elder Author: "R. M. Renfield." Very curious! ------ pboutros Nice job, Adrian Docea! ------ Fuffidish Best nature in Europe, sure	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Chargify to Increase Prices In May, Asking For Customer Feedback - speric http://chargify.com/blog/may-2012-price-change/ ====== toast76 From an email sent to customers re: their last price increase: Price assurance guarantee. We now understand that it’s impossible to grow your business if you can’t be sure how much Chargify will cost you. Going forward with our new plans, you won’t have to worry anymore because all plans will come with a 100% grandfathering guarantee for 12 months from the time of a price change. This means that any plan you’re on will be priced the same for you for 12 months from the implementation of a price increase. Conversely, if there is a decrease in the price of a plan, you can take advantage of it anytime.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
ChromeOS will no longer support ext2/3/4 on external drives/SD cards - doublextremevil https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=315401 ====== sah88 First you have to void your warranty to properly dual boot now this? They want to drop support for a file format so they can make renaming drives easier? I'm actually in the market for a new laptop/netbook. I was very close to purchasing a ChromeOS device as I work primarily on a desktop and have a laptop for travel but its pretty old, heavy and battery unfriendly. Then I found out I had to void the warranty to properly dual boot. Seems like a giant fuck you to the Linux community given how much Google has benefited from Linux(ChromeOS even runs on the Linux kernel) and they put out laptops that are more locked down than your average windows laptops? Pretty disappointing. I am assuming the write protect screws are there at the behest of Google. ~~~ JohnTHaller It makes sense if you think of what the purpose of Chrome OS is. The point is not to make inexpensive hardware to run any OS on. The point is not to create a new general-purpose open OS that people can build on. The point is to get people to put there stuff in the Google Cloud to become bigger Google customers. Period. That's why they make it difficult to dual boot and allow all your files to be wiped with a single key. That's also why anything you do on the Chromebook before you login to Google for the first time isn't saved. The point is to make everything on the laptop appear impermanent and to get you to think of the cloud as the place your digital stuff is actually stored. ~~~ moonchrome I'm actually wondering why would people spend money on a chromebook - the hardware is crap and the price isn't that great. If I was looking for a cheap portable web browsing device I'd get something like : [http://www.onda- tablet.com/onda-v975w-quad-core-win-8-tablet...](http://www.onda- tablet.com/onda-v975w-quad-core-win-8-tablet-9-7-inch-retina-screen-ram-2gb- wifi-32gb.html) \- that's a 10 inch Windows 8.1 tablet with 20481536 resolution, quad core atom and 2 GB ram for 220$. Throw in 20$ and you can find a USB case with keyboard. Portable, better performance, better screen, can be used as a "internet machine" with Win 8. ~~~ jadeddrag But is it locked to Win 8? Can you easily install ubuntu on it, or is all the hardware drivers closed source? ~~~ checkm33 No, it's not locked. But you can't install Ubuntu there (at least not easily). Google for "32-bit UEFI" if you need any more details about the sorry state of affairs with booting Linux on latest crop of Atom Bay Trail hardware. The only out-of-the-box working distro for it is "fedlet" \- some obscure fedora 21-alpha fork. ~~~ hollerith >Google for "32-bit UEFI" if you need any more details about the sorry state of affairs with booting Linux on latest crop of Atom Bay Trail hardware. There is at least one product with a Bay Trail CPU in it that runs Linux: [http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=19836](http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=19836). Unlike most Atom CPUs, the graphics driver for Linux on Bay Trail CPUs is completely open (like it is on Intel Core CPUs), which I guess makes it doubly sad that some manufacturers of products with Bay Trail CPUs in them are screwing up with the boot loader. ------ DCKing The title of this article is needlessly inflammatory. Can some mod change it? _ChromeOS_ is not dropping support ext at all; its _files application_ that is meant to be used with external drives is. That's a pretty huge difference. I actually think the rationale for this is pretty good: > Re #19, we understand that this was an undesirable decision for some users, > but we sometimes need to make a product decision like this. Chrome and > Chrome OS strive for simplicity. Every feature comes with complexity. > Complexity adds maintenance cost, QA cost, slows down development, and adds > surface of security exploits (as mentioned in #12). We should add a feature > only if its benefit clearly outweighs its cost, but this particular feature > was slipped in for some historical reason. It's a shame for the people who were actually using this. But lots of people are overlooking that _this is just about the ChromeOS files application_ : ChromeOS can still mount and access ext* drives in general through its Linux kernel and utilities, Crouton and the likes can still use it, and people who specifically need to use the files app for whatever reason have plenty of choices for a file system. ~~~ lotsofmangos If the worry is that ext* support widens the attack surface, how does removing support from the files app but not the OS, actually help much? The security argument sounds like excuses being made on the fly if a feature is left in and just hidden from userland. ~~~ DCKing > If the worry is that ext* support widens the attack surface Clearly, security is not _the_ worry. _The_ worry is that they have to lose time, effort and code simplicity on making te files app work with ext* systems. Additional code complexity has many downsides [1], only one of which is the security concern. Security is a concern that the ChromeOS developers and end users share, so that is why it is mentioned. Maintaining code dealing with ext* in the file manager app has many small disadvantages, of which the security risk is also one. This is not about the risks of "having ext exist in the system in general", this is about the disadvantages [2] of maintaining "your own additional code to handle ext systems". [1]: I feel this issue is waved away so many times, while HN _especially_ should know better. [2]: I'm aware that these things appear to be really small disadvantages, but the ChromeOS developers argue that the advantage of supporting it in the context of a program meant for external storage are even smaller, which I think is understandable. ~~~ lotsofmangos The way I look at it is that if ext* support is left in the system, it still needs tested thoroughly. Removing it from UI tools just means that it will be tested less, so while it may reduce complexity and increase security in one app, it actually could make things worse for the OS in general. It feels that mentioning security as part of the reason was just trying to justify the decision after the fact. ~~~ DCKing > The way I look at it is that if ext* support is left in the system, it still > needs tested thoroughly. Could you explain why? Especially 'thoroughly'. > It feels that mentioning security as part of the reason was just trying to > justify the decision after the fact. No doubt. The actual reason is "we don't want to maintain this piece of code anymore because of the added complexity". Security concerns are merely a consequence of this added complexity. That does not mean it is false to say it, though. ~~~ lotsofmangos Say there is an exploit in the OS ext* implementation, if ext* is not included in userland, then it will be subject to far less testing, so the exploit is less likely to be discovered. edit- the way I look at code security is that trying to write good code in the first place is not as important as the testing regime to find bad code, so while there is a risk of introducing new bugs by supporting ext* in the files app, this is counterbalanced by the risk that the underlying ext* implementation will not be included in as many tests. ~~~ DCKing > Say there is an exploit in the OS ext* implementation, if ext* is not > included in userland, then it will be subject to far less testing, so the > exploit is less likely to be discovered. If you want to mount an external ext* partition yourself in ChromeOS from now on, you'll have to do some manual work going down to Linux using a terminal or Crouton. If there's an exploit in _any_ of that, it will also affect millions of other Linux computers around the world as ChromeOS is no different from any other Linux distro with respect to ext* anymore (just Linux + ext kernel modules + e2fsprogs). Google will not feel obliged to cover that use case in their tests, and rightly so I think. In fact, they have described their "support" of ext* as accidental in the original thread, so it doesn't appear they ever tested it in the first place. ~~~ lotsofmangos That sounds like the same approach that everyone used with openSSL. The fact that code is open source is not a sane reason not to test it. ~~~ DCKing I sympathize with the general sentiment, but it misses the point. Linux + ext kernel modules + e2fsprogs is tested daily by developers of many Linux distributions. There's really no problem with verifying that some module works. Furthermore, Google tests this system implicitly by haveing ChromeOS use ext4 as its root file system. So everyone is right to be confident it works correctly. However, testing whether or not something _works_ is totally different from testing whether it is _secure_. Many people testing whether OpenSSL works correctly (which happens every single day) would not have shown Heartbleed at all. ------ microcolonel ChromiumOS developers can't even implement a script to relabel EXT volumes? No wonder their kernel tree is such a mess, they must barely know what they're doing. Also, I'd say you can safely assume that those 1-2% of users that use EXT volumes externally(which by the way, is a LOT of people, several million at least) are developers, and this will surely piss them off. ~~~ cnvogel Obviously no one can defend this decision with the labeling non-issue while keeping a straight face, so time to guess: What they are probably bitten by is the issue of ext4 actually keeping proper uid/gid associations with files. The other FS they seem to support [exFAT, FAT, UDF, NTFS] all are (as far as I know, and under Linux) completely agnostic to permissions and user-IDs: everything gets squashed to one uid/gid and fixed permissions. Probably _that_ is the actual problem they want to get rid of and which causes pains? They only mentioned the labeling as "features such as...", so there might be more bugreports/requests... Android (at least the Cyanogenmod variety on my phone) works around it with a small fuse-shim that fixes user-visible permissions on the fly, for all FS, including ext4. And ext4 makes for a very nice and well-performing fs on my phone. ~~~ asveikau > FS they seem to support [... NTFS] all are (as far as I know, and under > Linux) completely agnostic to permissions and user-IDs Uhhh... On Windows this definitely not true. The NT security descriptiors are kind of complex and I could imagine nobody wanting to sit down and map them to a Unixy system. But they are definitely there. ~~~ cnvogel That's why I added: ...and under Linux. I'm well aware of NTFS permissions, and use them daily, both in UI and programmatically. Under Windows, though. ------ nkuttler > On a related note, we may want to re-evaluate whether we'd like to continue > supporting ext2/3/4 filesystems (~2% of users, and the majority is probably > Chrome OS developers) in File.app. Yes, please, drop support for something the developers use, what could go wrong? The title seems misleading though, it seems that only the built in file manager will drop support for ext, and even then, maybe only for a specific feature? ~~~ logicallee >~2% of users 2% seems pretty high! If you make 50-70 kinds of these project management feature-drop decisions, then if the groups are mostly distinct, you'll have dropped 100% of your users (2% * 50 or 1.42% * 70 = 100%.) Think of it this way. If only two percent of your users have a first name that isn't in the top hundred first names in America, would you drop support for first names that aren't on your whitelist, in some form field? (because you want it to contain real data.) I think it's better to think through the rationale for dropping support (for example: If the people using this feature have a clear alternative, that is also better, and that they know about and will try and like. Then it might be acceptable In the first name example, the only rationale would be if this were some kind of game or something and people weren't expected to use their actual first name, and you also present them the list. Then it might work.) The rationale presented here is very weak. "Only highly-paid people (developers) trying to get work done use this, about 2% of our sales." Marketing win? ~~~ cnvogel It's not that bad in practice ;-)... Let's assume random distribution of used features among your customers. If you shoot randomly at your users with a 2% hit rate [alienate them by dropping a feature], your user will stay with your product with 98% probability. Do it 50 times, any user will have a 0.98^50 = 36% chance of not having been hit [having at least one important feature taken away from him that makes him stop using your product...], so only (100%-36%) 64% of users will drop your product and go elsewhere. ~~~ nitrogen Someone should have explained this to the GNOME team. ------ lucb1e And thus we returned to the stone ages of unjournaled FAT(-like) filesystems or bad NTFS driver implementations (the only good one is Microsoft's, and I doubt they'll be handing over the code for Chromium). It's not even something consumers see, it's a driver for crying out loud. It doesn't even make sense to remove it for "product simplicity" as they are claiming now. Edit: Left a comment with another argument about FAT being a bitmap filesystem (versus ext4's binary trees) and that developers are the people that are going to code for their OS. Ignoring the 1% is not the smartest move. [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=315401#c...](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=315401#c45) ~~~ wutbrodo >It's not even something consumers see, it's a driver for crying out loud. It doesn't even make sense to remove it for "product simplicity" as they are claiming now. I may be confused, but isn't the discussion about removing support in the files app UI (while actual ext support remains in the console)? That would mean the exact opposite of what you're saying: it's a UI change, not a driver change. ------ imrehg Of course as per Comment #21 someone has to make project management decisions, but decisions like "Chromium OS is for consumer devices which should not need support for mounting external ext4 storage" is just so painful to read. It's just a pile of assumptions that goes against the evidence of given my a lot of comments. ~~~ VLM "is for consumer" Generally speaking whenever someone starts speaking for the "other" they're doing something wrong and they know it and the othering is just CYA speech. ------ vxNsr I'm disappointed to see Chrome dropping features but it's even more disappointing to see the comments after this hit HN front page: >#37 vitalifs...@gmail.com >Are you idiots to remove ext support? Don't want to explain more than that. >Today (5 hours ago) #38 StromCl...@gmail.com >Sounds very very stupid (to remove Linux standard file systems)! >#42 Shve...@gmail.com >Sorry but you guys are mentally retarded at best. ~~~ wutbrodo Seriously: I was reading through the whole bug and finding the conversation (both complaints and responses) to be quite informative until I hit 100 posts of angry lunatics with nothing to contribute and often a misunderstanding of the issue in the first place. ~~~ ecspike It probably correlates to when it made Slashdot. ------ dscrd Given that this is the main filesystem in Linux, and is thereby automatically well supported by anything that leverages Linux, this choice makes absolutely no sense. Somebody in Google decided this; somebody in Google is a total idiot. ~~~ Guillaume86 Looks like Google have a politic to drop support for external storage and push the cloud (or force it on us depending of your PoV), same story on Android: [https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=65974](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=65974) ------ userbinator Security. Simplicity. Convenience. Does it seem like these words are being used as a generic reason to justify almost anything these days? I think that and the continued trend of removing "developer-only" features are really going to decrease the number of future developers (because of all the hoops they have to jump through), so they're basically shooting themselves in the foot. ~~~ Dewie Yeah... the following (which I assume that you're referring to) > > Re #19, we understand that this was an undesirable decision for some > users, but we sometimes need to make a product decision like this. Chrome > and Chrome OS strive for simplicity. Every feature comes with complexity. > Complexity adds maintenance cost, QA cost, slows down development, and adds > surface of security exploits (as mentioned in #12). We should add a feature > only if its benefit clearly outweighs its cost, but this particular feature > was slipped in for some historical reason. Sounds reasonable enough. But it could be used to justify pretty much anything. ------ xg15 It looks like this ticket was opened a year ago, during which almost no discussion took place. People only started to voice objections after the patch was already written and submitted. I think it would be useful if tickets with breaking changes could come to the public's attention a bit earlier than this time. I have no idea how to find such tickets of course. The search function of the issue tracker doesn't seem very helpful... ~~~ Intermernet Very good point. It seems that this was tagged "Type-Feature" which is meant to mean "Request for new or improved features". I'm not sure how _removing_ functionality is a "new or improved" feature, except from the developers POV due to reduced complexity. This is probably not how the users would define "new or improved". They possibly need a new tag for "Type-FeatureRemoval" or similar. ------ dingaling Thereby entrenching the FAT patent fee scheme. This is a very odd decision that originated in the difficulty of renaming external volumes ( why was this considerd important? ) and then became conflated with 'security'. I believe the kernel modules are still there, though, so you can mount ext _x_ from the command line in dev mode. But not much use for everyday users. ~~~ danmaz74 BTW, when will those patents expire? Shouldn't be long I guess.. ~~~ techrat The issue is exFAT and Fat32 long filenames. exFAT was introduced with Windows Vista and is what 32GB+ flash media tends to be formatted in. It'll be a long time before this one expires. ~~~ caf Does anyone know exactly what innovation(s) in exFAT is/are newly patented? Which patents read on it? ~~~ techrat From wiki: >exFAT is a proprietary file system. However exFAT is protected under US patent law, and its initial application was issued on 10 July 2009 under the application number US2008168029.[7] On 12 November 2013, the patent was granted by the US patent office under US8583708. Patent length is 20 years, so we're looking at least until 2033 before exFat is expired and (safely) freely usable. ~~~ cowsandmilk > Patent length is 20 years, so we're looking at least until 2033 before exFat > is expired and (safely) freely usable. Nope. For the dates this was filed, length goes from filing date. Depending on how dangerous you want to be, you could argue it expires anywhere from 2024-2028. ------ shams93 Yeah I was wondering why I suddenly couldn't load my crouton on external 64 gig stick, really annoying google blew off my entire android development environment. ~~~ redthrow Is there any reason why you want to keep ChromeOS at all? [https://www.distroshare.com/distros/get/14/](https://www.distroshare.com/distros/get/14/) ------ logicchains I wonder how the cost of maintaining ext2/3/4 support compares to the revenue loss from Linux developers abandoning your platform in droves... ------ mike-cardwell Even if I didn't care about Ext support, there's no way I'm going to buy into Chrome OS now. Who knows what other important features they'll remove in future for the sake of "simplicity" ------ chris_wot One of the comments said that there was some sort of security exploit because of extra features. I really have to question what sort of reasoning this is, and what sort of maintenance burden they expect from this? ~~~ kentonv It is true that the ext4 filesystem driver is a large attack surface that is probably not well-vetted for the possibility of a maliciously-crafted filesystem (since the usual threat model comes from the opposite direction). If it has vulnerabilities, this could allow someone to create a USB stick that pwns the host system when inserted. This is, of course, equally true of all the other filesystem drivers. But fewer total drivers available clearly means less attack surface. So, yeah, it's a legitimate concern. ~~~ danieldk _It is true that the ext4 filesystem driver is a large attack surface_ The problem is that reasoning can be applied to any feature you want to get rid of. A good reason would be, _we had N vulnerabilities in ext4 in the last six months, which is more than the kernel FAT support, which had only M vulnerabilities_. Besides that, the attack vector seems fairly theoretical to me. Most users will take a blank SD card and format it as ext4 themselves. ~~~ kentonv > The problem is that reasoning can be applied to any feature you want to get > rid of. Well, of course it can. That's more or less the Chrome team's point: they want to remove any feature that isn't widely used, because every feature is an attack vector. > A good reason would be, we had N vulnerabilities in ext4 in the last six > months, which is more than the kernel FAT support, which had only M > vulnerabilities. Not really, no. The absence of reported vulnerabilities in a time period could mean that there are none, but more likely it just means no one has looked, like with Bash. The things you need to ask yourself when considering attack surface reduction are: * How complicated is this piece of code? (More complication = more bugs.) * Is it likely that this code has been well-studied with respect to the proposed threat model? (For ext4, probably not -- it's designed to be used on your internal disk, which is not an attack vector.) * How painful would it be for users to simply remove it? (Obviously, removing ext4 harms far fewer users than removing FAT, developers notwithstanding.) > Besides that, the attack vector seems fairly theoretical to me. Most users > will take a blank SD card and format it as ext4 themselves. Theoretical? Flash drives loaded with malware are an actual, widely-used attack vector, used by everyone from simple identity thieves to governments (look up Stuxnet, which was used to damage Iran's nuclear infrastructure). Things have gotten better since Windows stopped auto-running software on such drives, but a filesystem exploit that kicks in on mount would be more effective and harder to detect (no telltale files visible in the file browser). ~~~ kentonv OK, I actually asked a kernel dev friend about this because it affects my work on sandstorm.io, and he says that defense against malicious filesystems is in fact something Theodore Ts'o, the ext4 maintainer (and Googler), cares deeply about. Awesome! Now, that doesn't automatically mean it's safe, but given this new piece of information, I'd say that the case for removing ext4 for attack surface reasons is significantly weakened. ------ antman Android KitKat and ChromeOS SDCard blunders pretty much show Google's policy. They have me searching the forums for another unnecessary rooting procedure. Simplicity should be optional and easily disabled through a checkbox in settings. I am afraid FirefoxOS will make the same assumptions. ~~~ zanny > I am afraid FirefoxOS will make the same assumptions. I'll punch myself in the face the day Mozilla stops supporting patent unencumbered free and technically better filesystems for patent encumbered proprietary Microsoft specific crap. ------ mrmondo I am actually left speechless. Who on earth thought this was a good idea? ------ nodata Because they can't relabel an extX volume? How does that make any sense? ------ nickthemagicman Is is possible to just wipe chromeOS off of a chromebook and install a full Linux (with reasonable driver support)? ~~~ ewoodrich Yes, you can. And Chrubuntu has great driver support for the c720 and other popular models, but I still ran into some bugs with suspend and Wifi, so I stick with a chroot. ~~~ nickthemagicman Is chroot just using the built in command line? ~~~ ewoodrich [https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton](https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton) Crouton is a install script that uses a chroot to install Ubuntu through the shell on ChromeOS. You still need to enable developer mode, and it uses the ChromeOS kernel, but other than that it looks and feels like a "normal" Ubuntu installation. ------ cpks All I have to say is fuck Google. I would never use a Chromebook, for a hundred reasons. However, sabotaging Linux support in this way is both shortsighted, aggressive, and moronic. Our kids need to learn to use computers. Not just use Word and Internet Explorer, but learn to hack. Not just consume, but create. Computers 30 years ago were tinkerable. Google is doing everything in its power to take away that tinkerability, and worse, to undermine tinkerable systems. ------ kzahel I'll be glad if ext* support is removed from Files.app. I once had it corrupt my externally mounted ext3 hard disk and lost a ton of data. I never should have been doing that kind of thing with Files.app in the first place. It's really only designed to be used with your "Downloads" folder where there's a warning that all your files might be auto-deleted anyway. ------ derpenxyne A member of the team has just opened a potential solution to the problem through the new chrome.fileSystemProvider API: crbug.com/422764 ~~~ Vendan And, as I already posted, it's a rather idiotic one. Does the project member not understand the issue? Kernel support hasn't been removed yet, just the userspace stuff. Last thing we need is to rewrite existing, solid code in JS. ------ riffraff what is the root filesystem in ChromeOS? ~~~ shaurz ext4 ------ ghshephard This issue was closed July 21st, 2014 - anybody care to comment what inspired its discussion today? ~~~ cowsandmilk pushed out in the last week as part of stable release version 38 of chromeOS? There are hundreds of thousands of tickets, end users won't follow those, they care once stuff lands on their systems. ------ higherpurpose Does it support F2FS then? That would be for the best. ------ bert2002 luckily notices this before my trip... what the hell? ------ Dewie I guess that chromebook laptops are cheap (?). Chrome OS seemed appealing to me initially, because of the short start up time. But then, reasonably sized SSDs became affordable[1], and any faster boot times than what Linux + SSD can give me is kind of _meh_ , to me. What are the advantages of ChromeOS over other operating systems? [1] And if you are considering a Chrome OS laptop, chances are that you won't be needing something like >500GB storage for it, I would presume. ------ mcguire The important takeaway: " _Chromium OS is for consumer devices which should not need support for mounting external ext4 storage._ " ~~~ shaurz Am I not a consumer then in their eyes? I use ext4 on all my external media and I don't develop for Chrome OS.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How to get feedback from people who signed up but churned? - diegogoncalves When someone use my product for a while and I send a message, for a good percentage I get feedback but for people who signed up and didn't use much the product/dropout before even activating I'm having a hard time to get feedback<p>How can you get feedback from users who are churning? Any creative methods that helped you? I'd love to hear your story about getting feedback ====== amrrs There's a thing called Exit Survey that a lot of people use. I've seen it working too. There are some SaaS products that can do that part of marketing automation cycles.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Moving The New York Times Games Platform to Google App Engine - spyspy https://open.nytimes.com/moving-the-new-york-times-games-platform-to-google-app-engine-e9337f2c9444 ====== obulpathi Two things keep coming up while comparing GCP and AWS: * This accomplishment would not have been possible for our three-person team of engineers with out Google Cloud (AWS is too low level, hard to work with and does not scale well). * We’ve also managed to cut our infrastructure costs in half during this time period (Per minute billing, seamless autoscaling, performance, sustained usage discounts, ... ) ~~~ vira28 This thread here came at the right time. Today whole day I attended the DynamoDB training. Honestly, one thing that I understood is its cost based on reads and writes per second. Irrespective of the amount of read data per operation (whether its 1 bytes or 100 bytes), its always charged for 1KB. So, as a work around what they suggested is using a Kinesis, a Lambda and an another service to make the write operation as a batch, in such a way the reads are near 1KB always. He pitched it like thats the perfect way to do. The problem I see is too many moving pieces for a simple thing to achieve. If the Dynamo team makes the reads cost based on the actual data we are all set. ~~~ obulpathi Yep, same problems with many other services: * Kinesis Streams: Writes limited to 1K/sec and 1 MB / shard, reads limited to 2K/shard. Want a different read/write ratio? Nop, not possible. Proposed solution: use more shards. Does not scale automatically. There is another service called Kinesis Streams that does not offer read access to streaming data. * EFS: Cold start problems. If you have small amount of data in EFS, reads and writes are throttled. Ran into into some serious issues due to write throttling. * ECS: Two containers can not use same port on same node. Anti pattern to containers. AWS services have lots of strings attached and minimums for usage and billing. Building such services (based on fixed quotas) is much easier than building services which are billed purely pay per use. This complexity + cost optimization pressures lead to complexity and require more human resources and time as well. AWS got good lead in Cloud space, but they need to improve their services without letting them rot. ~~~ oblio > * ECS: Two containers can not use same port on same node. Anti pattern to > containers. Could you elaborate for this? I'm not sure I understand, are you saying that 2 containers cannot be mapped to the same host port? Because that would seem normal, you can't bind to a port where there's already something listening. But I guess I must be missing something. ~~~ alexeldeib I'm not familiar with the details of AWS here, but maybe the OP means mapping two different host ports to the same port on two different containers? That's all I can imagine that would be a container antipattern in the way described. ~~~ hobofan That is perfectly possible with ECS, so I don't know what OP was referring to. The thing I remember though is that you have to jump through a lot of hoops like making 4 APIs calls (or worse with pagination) for what should have been a single call to make such a system work on ECS. ------ ciguy As a DevOps consultant I've actually worked with clients migrating stacks to and from GCE/AWS (Yeah, both ways, not the same client). What I've found in aggregate is that GCE is a bit easier to use at first as AWS has a LOT of features and terminology to learn. When it comes down to it though, many GCE services felt really immature, particularly their CloudSQL offering. One client recently moved from GCE to AWS simply because their CloudSQL (Fully replicated with fail-over setup according to GCE recommendations) kept randomly dying for several minutes at a time. After a LOT of back and forth Google finally admitted that they had updated the replica and the master at the same time, so when it failed over the replica was also down. There were other instances of unexplained downtime that were never adequately explained, but overall that experience was enough for me (And the client) to totally lose faith in the GCE teams competence. Even getting a serious investigation into intermittent downtime and an explanation took over a month. By that time our migration to AWS was in progress. GCE never did explain why they would choose to apply updates to replica + master SQL at the same time and as far as I know they are still doing this. I asked if we could at least be notified of update events, was told that's not possible. There were other issues as well that taken together just made GCE seem amateurish. I'm sure as they mature a bit things will get better, and it is cheaper which is why I wouldn't necessarily recommend against them for startups just getting going today. By the time you are really scaling it's like they'll have more of the kinks worked out. ~~~ karmakaze Why CloudSQL instead of Cloud Spanner? If for existing SQL workloads I can understand but for new services I'm admiring Spanner over DynamoDB ~~~ vira28 Looks like Spanner is a relational database. DDB is just a key-value pair. So, is it fair to compare against them or am i missing something? ~~~ ubernetes Why wouldn't it be "fair"? ~~~ dullgiulio Because a key-value store is a foundamentally simpler data structure (it's an hash) than a relational database, which tracks the relations between different data types. If you make an advanced use of the key-value store, you have a lot of logic in the application (for example to key management, cascade operations between related data...) which a relational database should do for you. It's not fair because there is a development cost in using the key-value you are ignoring. ~~~ ubernetes Dynamo is not a k-v store. ------ neya Hey community, let me share my experience with AppEngine. I work in a small firm, where we've developed a massive Software Application comprising of 12 medium-sized apps. I went with Phoenix 1.3 w/ the new umbrella architecture. With AppEngine, the beauty is that you can have many custom named microservices under one AppEngine project and each microservices can have many versions. You can even decide how much percentage of traffic should be split between each of these microservices. What's awesome is, in addition to the standard runtimes (Ruby, Python, Go, Java, etc.) Google also provides something called custom VMs for AppEngine, meaning you can push docker based setups into your AppEngine service, with basically any stack you want. This alone is a HUGE incentive to move to AppEngine because usually custom stack will require you to maintain the server side of things, but with Docker + AppEngine, zero devops. Their network panel is also very intuitive to add/delete rules to keep your app secured. I've been using AppEngine for over 4 years now and every time I tried a competitive offering (such as AWS Beanstalk, for example) I've only been disappointed. AppEngine is great for startups. For example, a lesser known feature within AppEngine is their real-time image processing service API. This allows you to scale/crop/resize images in real time and the service is offered free of charge (except for storage). Works really well for web applications with basic image manipulation requirements. [https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/imag...](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/images/) The best part is, you call your image with specific parameters that'll do transformations on the fly. For example, <image url>/image.jpg?s=120 will return a 120px image. Appending -c will give you a cropped version, etc. I really hope to see AppEngine get more love from startups as it's a brilliant platform, much more performant than it's competitors' offerings. For example, I was previously a huge proponent of Heroku and upon comparing numbers, I realized AppEngine is way more performant (in my use case). I'm so glad we made the switch. If you're looking/considering to move to AppEngine, let me know here and I'll try my best to answer your questions. ~~~ smn1234 The way you've delivered this "experience" makes you sound like you either work for Google or were asked to make a sponsored statement - for credits or $. ~~~ sunsetMurk or a passionate user who had a great experience?! I love finding solutions which require less 'square peg round hole'. Unfortunately, rare these days when piecing together a stack w/ the myriad of platforms/frameworks/etc. ~~~ BoorishBears I'm usually not skeptical of comments but this comment definitely feels "artificial". I think Google has better things to do than to pay people to comment on HN, but I do think either this person is trying too hard to sell us on Google Cloud because they like it (which isn't a bad thing per say) Edit: I thought about it and they probably aren't related to it, probably just really enthusiastic about it (good thing) but they want to sell us on it (eh, not sure how I feel about) ~~~ sunsetMurk Yep - I guess I'm a bit empathic to the comment. I'm always trying to sell what I'm using to others, to get more into that camp, to generate more discussion and innovation. But, it's all just like ice cream [1] anyways. 1- [https://twitter.com/adamlaz/status/900621343347146752](https://twitter.com/adamlaz/status/900621343347146752) ------ nrjames I migrated a big data stack to GCP from AWS. Reasons: GCP has better documentation, the AWS console and various services confuse the heck out of me (I guess I'm getting too old), and the security integration between GCP services saves a huge amount of time. It's super easy and very fast to used the Google Compute Engine VMs. Given that the company I work for uses G Suite, it's a piece of cake to implement SSO and other integration pieces. It's also cheaper for us than AWS and more performant. ~~~ jsudhams Wait until GCP becomes older with bigquery and other versions. Also GCP does not have regions ready and it takes forever to get a new region. Waiting for Mumbai region for more than 3 to 4 months now. But one thing i like about GCP is that it allows to the limit setting in terms of cost and ensure you wont cross it. In case of AWS it can give alerts but for some reason say all you team in in one location and there is emergency like flood etc and you dont check email then you are done. I stopped using AWS after i learned that there is simply no way to set limit. Waiting for GCP to open their Mumbai region. sigh. Also AWS is very deceiving with free tier , there is simply no way to understand which products get free and worst case is after free tier you will get charged. ~~~ yeukhon AWS doesn't add a new region every 3-4 months either. Adding a new region is very complicated. Normally vendor does not actually build the DC themselves. They would source from other data centers in the region whenever possible. Building a new DC is not something can be taken lightly. Then finally local laws. ------ vs2 "Due to the inelastic architecture of our AWS system, we needed to have the systems scaled up to handle our peak traffic at 10PM when the daily puzzle is published." WT... I had to reread this to make sure I didnt misunderstand... why not work on making the current arhictecture elastic?! #cloudPorn ~~~ tyingq The "inelastic" might have been a shot at AWS. When pressed, the AWS people do use phrases like "pre-warming", "over provisioning" and "advance notice" around their ELB/ALB setup and ECS. Google's cloud salespeople pitch that they don't require any of that. ~~~ g09980 Curious if the need for pre-warming ELB/ALB still applies. Last time this came up, an AWS employee mentioned it is no longer necessary ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14052079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14052079)), but would be nice if this was documented. ~~~ callalex I don't want to dox myself but about a year ago when my employer forgot to notify AWS about switching our production traffic (about 5K rps at that time) from one ELB to another we failed requests for several minutes before we decided to just switch back to the old ELB then ask them to do a prewarming before we switched again. ------ pgrote Interesting they are using Medium instead of in house publishing tools. It is the first time I've noticed then open.nytimes.com articles. ~~~ devrandomguy Didn't you hear? Medium pays per clap now, so the NYT authors are all jumping ship /s ------ Jedi72 Getting pro GCP articles to the top of HN must no-doubt be a high priority for the Google marketing team. This is the nature of modern advertising, sneakily trying to subvert your thinking by masquerading as something else. ~~~ theDoug We actually spent the entire day at the Giants game today. ¯\\(ツ)/¯ There's no incentive for high ranking HN posts, or any HN posts, actually. If there were, you wouldn't see others continually submit our news here before we do. This was a nice and unprompted post for everyone in GCP to read, as well. (Disclosure: I work on GCP as a product marketer.) ~~~ ben_jones A GCP product marketer responding to negative commentary on HN within ~20 minutes of it being posted strikes me as automated. EDIT: It is a double standard though, HN readers want access and responses from people on the GCP team but at the same time tinfoil hat subliminal marketing etc. ~~~ sb8244 I would be reading this every 10 minutes for new comments if it was my product up for discussion. ~~~ bastawhiz Ten minutes even seems like a lot. If I saw my website on HN, I'd have alerts set up for new comments. ------ NightlyDev This doesn't really make much sense to me. How many peak users are there? What's the number of requests per second? I can't imagine that the load would be so high that it wouldn't be possible to do it without GCP with three developers. It would be way more interesting with performance details. :) ------ bsaul Has anybody had successful experience deploying docker containers on appengine ? Last time i tried, i had such a bad experience in terms of deployment speed ( time to build the image, then upload it, then waiting for the stuff to deploy) that i reverted to managing my own gce instance. But maybe i had bad luck.. ~~~ tarr11 I just tried to move a rails app to appengine. It uses the flexible environment (eg, docker). It took like 10 or 15 minutes to deploy, each time. Heroku does my deploy in about 5 mins. [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google- appengine/hZM...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google- appengine/hZMEkmmObDU) GCloud is cheaper though. Also, VMs spin up in GCloud amazingly fast. Like 5 seconds. Feels like somebody at Gcloud just needs to go and fix this. No reason this is so bad... ~~~ brianwawok Deploy is 15 seconds on GKE. Wonder why app engine is so bad. ~~~ lftl With GKE you don't necessarily update your load balancer rules with a deploy correct? The linked thread points the blame for app engine deploys on waiting for GCLB to update. ~~~ brianwawok Correct, you have software based load balancing under the covers. My Google Load Balancers never move.. It is a single thing that points each node (physical machine) in the cluster, and distributes traffic between then. Each node knows how to route traffic to each app. So when I deploy that app, the software load balancer at the node level will slowly move traffic over from old app to new app. Entire thing is MAGICAL. And 0 downtime, very very fast deploys. Edit - But yes this explains iy. Changing the google load balancers is like a 5 minute ordeal. Total pain. Nice that with GKE you only need to touch them when your node count changes, which can be very rare (~monthly for me) ------ foxylad OT. How nice not see a single "avoid all Google services because reader" comment. Maybe we are finally moving on. ~~~ CaveTech Yet here you are. ------ merb Uh thanks to this article I've seen that AppEngine know supports Java8, this is really really cool. ------ revelation I was sure this was about some multiplayer game thing, but no, it's a crossword. Not entirely sure what they are even scaling here, I was expecting an article about a CDN.. ~~~ jprob The game allows you to sync your game progress across multiple devices and it's subscription based so a CDN wouldn't do much help there. Also, realtime multiplayer crosswords are coming! I'll be speaking at GothamGo this year about that exact topic. ------ kennethh Anyone know how much it cost to add a custom domain and SSL to AppEngine(Standard og Flexible)? I have been looking and not able to find out how much it cost. ~~~ iamgopal SSL is free. Custom domain also free. ~~~ kennethh That explains it, would be nice if they could write it down somewhere as a feature:) ~~~ rhodysurf Its free for custom but only to use existing certs. You still have to set up the cert and such with your domain as you normally would. You also get the *.appengine.com domain with automatic SSL> ~~~ iamgopal SSL cert provided by Google is free and is in private alpha stage. It's coming soon with GA. ------ zitterbewegung Nice advertisement that Google bought from the NyTimes. ------ mbesto This reads eerily like a press release for GCP... ~~~ s17n But check out OPs posting history. ~~~ lallysingh 4 posts about NYT crossword. So they're talking about their work, and their work uses GCP. ~~~ spyspy Quite	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Do any startups have dress codes? - johndavidback https://medium.com/@johndavidback/kill-dress-codes-3dbeec685dbd#.83927bpkv ====== dalke I do not like how the author jokes that women in workout shorts make him sweaty, nor the call out to "Be the bro tank you want to see in the world.". If you want to get rid of dress codes then you must also accept whatever anyone else wears. Otherwise, dress codes will continue to exist so that, for example, women at the office who want to workout shorts to work don't have to deal with sweaty co-workers who objectify them on the internet. Urban Dictionary kindly informs me that "bro tank" is a tank top intended to show of muscles on a male. One of the more negative descriptions includes: > A normal non-douche will refer to these garments as "douche tanks", but the > tank wearing "bro" will deny the quality of doucheness that comes with the > product. If the user admits that the tank is in fact, a douche tank, he is > most likely not a douche. A "bro tank" has no class, and anyone with any > qualities of a gentleman, will not wear a "bro tank". Bearing in mind the mish-mash that is Urban Dictionary, that term sounds like part of an identity culture that I don't want to associate with.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
People’s Bank of China started advanced testing of digital currency - CalmStorm https://www.forbes.com/sites/biserdimitrov/2020/04/16/these-chinese-blockchain-platforms-are-launching-soon-here-is-why/ ====== CalmStorm It is mentioned in the article that the digital currency supports offline transactions. How can this be done with blockchain, which required up-to-date information to validate transactions? ~~~ yorwba One way to implement it would be to defer validation until nodes come back online, and if double-spending is detected at that point, well, that's fraud and it comes with cryptographic proof of guilt. The rest can be handled by the legal system.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Bitcoin for Gold – Major Gold Dealer Now Accepting Bitcoin - glmxstd http://blockchaincourier.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin-for-gold-major-gold-dealer-now-accepting-bitcoin/ ====== GhostVII If the cost in Bitcoin changes when the value of Bitcoin in USD changes, you aren't paying in Bitcoin - you are paying in USD, you just happen to be converting your Bitcoin over first. ~~~ marshray That's like saying if the cost in USD of chocolate from Switzerland changes with USDCHF then you're not actually paying in USD. All international transactions are affected by exchange rate, it's just a question of to what degree the importer is willing to eat the cost of minor fluctuations. This is more likely to occur with high-margin consumer items (e.g., Nintendo games tend to stay priced at round numbers) than with low- margin items. Gold and BTC both approximate pure financial instruments and are notionally almost zero margin. Thus we would expect their prices to be quoted very precisely.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The electric scooter Bird startup with big workplace problems - zoolander2 https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/23/21231802/bird-electric-scooter-company-workplace-culture-layoffs ====== ashtonkem I live in the area where Bird is headquartered, and they have an absolutely toxic reputation around town. Not the scooters themselves, but the company. I got _congratulated_ on not getting an offer there by a shocking number of people, something I didn’t even see with Uber before the beginning of their PR debacle. And not the “oh, it would’ve been a really tough work hard play hard environment” comments, but more of “they seem like jerks” comments. I was genuinely taken aback. ------ notacoward Previously on HN: Bird lays off hundreds via Zoom call [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707935) Apparently Bird has disputed the part about the announcement being pre- recorded, but not the part about shutting off employees' computers during the call so they couldn't contact each other for support/recommendations. Sounds like some real winners are in charge there. ------ exogeny I’m torn. On one hand, this reads like your typical former-darling hit piece, bedrocked on out-of-context tales told by ex-employees with an axe to grind. On the other hand, they really are a paint-by-numbers of so many different but oh-so-stereotypical plagues: too much money too early, arrogant and homogeneous leadership, questionable product focus and even more questionable operational discipline. Truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but it doesn’t matter. They’re boned. Even if they make it to the other side of the pandemic, the unit economics will likely never work and even if a firesale exit emerges, late- stage preferred will wipe out any common by several multiples. The tragedy of course is that by the time that happens, leadership has already taken money off the table multiple times, so they'll be fine and if anything fail upwards to a cushy EIR spot or their next venture, which will be funded solely on the basis of how fast Bird grew and not how it ultimately failed. (Ain't SV grand.) Ah, you’d think we’d learn these lessons from all the other times this story has been told, but no. ~~~ bb88 Back in the day there was fuckedcompany.com. It's too bad it doesn't exist anymore because it seems silicon valley just keeps repeating it's mistakes over and over. ------ jasondclinton How do these tech "leaders" watch Silicon Valley and then behave exactly like the maligned characters and _not_ see themselves as part of the problem? ~~~ exogeny When you have people who look just like you giving you ungodly amounts of money, it’s easy to believe your superhero story and ignore everything else. And then you hire people who also look just like you to reinforce it. ------ Poehinae Well, on one hand you can definitely understand that Bird might need to cut back on spending, but on the other, so many of their decisions just tend to be of bad management and lack of foresight. Will be interesting to see where the scooter startup bust-boom cycle will end after the COVID-19 situation clears. ------ Nextgrid Bird’s whole strategy from day one was to give away a service for below market price, “grow” and then... _crickets_? The thing would never be profitable even in the best case scenario and the current situation is far from a best-case scenario. How did they get funding? Did they lie to investors or were the investors extremely stupid? On that note I have an amazing, high-growth business idea that will give us millions of users and insanely good PR in a matter of days. We’ll just be selling $10 notes for $1. I’m looking for investors; email in my profile. ~~~ ashtonkem This is literally the Uber business model; use a willingness to break the law and mountains of VC funding to bankrupt all competitors, then raise prices once you’ve got a monopoly. It’s dubious if this would ever work in the long run, given the risk of both anti-monopoly prosecution and the rise of competitors hoping to repeat the trick against you. With Bird it was a bit dicier. They aren’t a straight up replacement for existing services like Uber was. This means there was a new and unique market to capture, but it also means that consumer willingness to pay higher prices later remains a dubious possibility at best.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Reddit's traffic grew by 300% in 2010 - Aqwis http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/evmek/2010_we_hardly_knew_ye/ ====== Mystalic Title's wrong. Growing by 300% means Reddit would be at 1 billion pageviews. Grow by 100%, you get 500 million. Grow by 200%, you get 750 million. Grow by 231.6%, you get 829 million. ------ tzs They are not handling the load well, and it is getting bad enough to discourage me from commenting there. It was annoying but livable when it was just slow loading when reading, but lately it has progressed to errors when trying to post. That is a lot more annoying because then you've either got to give up on the post, or save a copy somewhere to try again later. It's also losing the status of inboxes. That is, it will show the orange envelope meaning you've got a message (typically someone replied to one of your comments). You then click that to see the reply, and it just sits there not responding. If you give up and go elsewhere, it often has marked your messages as read, even though you never saw them. I'd prefer if posting and dealing with the inbox were given high priority, even if it meant more "you broke reddit" messages when I try to read stories. ~~~ jedberg We're almost ready to hire a couple of really awesome folk. Then we have to train them. Then they can be useful and help us make the site faster and more stable. We're just really constrained on human time right now. ~~~ adrianbye so hire people you don't have to train. you have enough traffic to monetize a better team ~~~ jedberg Even the smartest person in the world will have to learn our architecture and codebase, our processes, our logins, our machine names, etc. No matter how amazing they are, I'm not giving them the root password on the first day or letting them redo the databases or write major code changes. Everyone requires training. ~~~ die_sekte You obviously need Roger, the cokefiend. (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065416>) ------ vladd Traffic in December exhibits weird patterns (lower for business sites and higher for leisure sites due to the holidays). I wonder if they avoided a December 2009 to December 2010 comparison on purpose (or if they preferred the Jan-vs-Dec one to get a better growth). ~~~ corin_ Not quite as simple as business vs. leisure, but I agree that the only reason they'd chose Dec10/Jan10 not Dec10/Dec09 is to make the stats look more impressive. ~~~ jedberg Actually, they would have been more impressive if we did Dec to Dec. Our traffic is usually down in Dec. We did it that way because we were reviewing 2010. ~~~ corin_ Then that's really odd, the way any business would normally review a year's performance is to compare December/December, because that's the best way to get a decent comparison without being influenced by factors such as "Our traffic is usually down in Dec." Same thing for other time periods - if you want to see how good traffic was over a weekend, you don't compare Sat/Sun to Thur/Fri, you compare Sat/Sun to the previous week's Sat/Sun. Our traffic is usually down in Dec. Oddly, I've found that to be the case every year, across a range of non- business for-leisure websites. ~~~ jedberg We weren't trying to review our performance year to year though. We were just showing how the beginning of 2010 compared to the end. All the media decided to make it a year over year comparison, which it was never intended as. ------ elvirs I remember a few years back top bloggers and industry 'experts' talking about reddit being toasted in competition with digg. Amazing momentum after 5 years. Congrats. ~~~ dhughes At the bottom of articles on websites when I see share on digg and delicious icons I think "Oh my." ------ stevefink I wonder how much of that traffic is from folks who ditched Digg? ~~~ andrewljohnson Judging by Quantcast, it's not correlated. Reddit has been steadily growing, and Digg just did a face plant. ~~~ mikeryan Reddit has stated that Quantcast and Compete's numbers are pretty much flat wrong for them. You'd have to assume the same for digg. [http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate- our-...](http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our- traffic.html) ~~~ slig What about adplanner data? [https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en...](https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en#siteDetails?identifier=reddit.com&geo=001&trait_type=1&lp=true) Seems to be right, as it comes from Analytics. ~~~ mikeryan That shows a huge spike in traffic in late August and Sept, right around the launch of the digg redesign, unlike Quantcast and Compete ;-) ------ absconditus And revenue? Will we see more begging for money this year? ~~~ cookiecaper Reddit Gold is not really "begging". They allow you to set your own price for an enhanced set of features. While Reddit Gold is mostly about expressing your support for Reddit, it's not a straight up donation, and Reddit didn't spend two months with a banner at 25% screen height with a bearded kn0thing or ketralnis staring down the userbase. ~~~ JeremyBanks _set your own price_ That was only the deal for the first couple of days; it now has a fixed price of $4 (or a postcard) per month. ------ diego The search: sucked => works part is us (IndexTank). Thanks Reddit for the mention! ------ dezwald I'm curious to know if it's reddit's GUi design/usability or it's content/community that keeps it a growing success. For me, it's their design approach that i enjoy using, especially after reviewing their second project, hipmunk. ~~~ vessenes Interesting. I came to Reddit for the intelligent conversation compared to Digg. The commenting system was pretty great, as well as the subreddit system though, so I'd call it as a good mix of people and UI. Eventually, I realized it was wasting my time like digg, just in a less obvious way. Also, the community had grown enough that those long joke threads and aggressive attempts at meme creation were hurting my enjoyment. These are not solvable problems on reddit in my opinion. I finally turned in the towel after an extremely long thread on how useless churches are in America: criticize all you want, (and I will certainly continue to do so), but churches feed and take care of homeless people and poor people in every county (and probably, town) of America. My final solution was to add the following to my /etc/hosts file: 174.132.225.106 reddit.com www.reddit.com This has saved me a lot of time. In exchange, I've missed (I imagine) many outrage-generating stories on US civil rights, a lot of great pictures of cats, and in exchange get to skip reading the perspectives of many, many 4chan alums. ~~~ nowarninglabel The trick to post-2008 Reddit is to be very, very judicious about which sub- reddits you subscribe to. There are still quite a few gems. I've flirted with abandoning ship since the early 2009 hockey stick growth, but found peace by continuously weeding out sub-reddits that had gone bad. It's kind of like pruning a bonzai tree. ~~~ redthrowaway This is my go-to answer to anyone who complains about pun threads and whatnot. If you're running into that stuff, you're on the wrong subreddits. My discussions there are perfectly enjoyable since removing r/atheism, r/pics, r/reddit.com, etc. ------ staunch How many monthly uniques? ~~~ jedberg About 12 million last month. About 5 million last January. ------ samratjp Congrats Reddit! Wish you and Hipmunk greater success in 2011 :-) ~~~ kn0thing Why thank you! ------ axod No mention of revenue or profit or how many millions they're paying Amazon for hosting. Traffic is great but profit is better. ------ michaelty Any overflow effect on HN? ~~~ Aqwis I for one found HN through Reddit. ~~~ redthrowaway Same. Given that HN was originally supposed to be _part_ of Reddit, that's not surprising. ~~~ jedberg > Given that HN was originally supposed to be part of Reddit, that's not > surprising. What makes you say that? ~~~ redthrowaway I thought the story was that PG wanted his own subreddit where nobody could downvote, you said no, so he built HN (this is a paraphrasing of hazy memories) edit: If memory serves, Steve mentioned this offhand in a video interview I saw somewhere. I think this one, but I could be wrong. [http://blog.hipmunk.com/mixergy-interview-with-steve- huffman...](http://blog.hipmunk.com/mixergy-interview-with-steve-huffman-on- reddi) ~~~ kn0thing That is correct.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Email is dying among mobile’s youngest users - rezist808 http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/email-is-dying-among-mobiles-youngest-users/ ====== lazylizard was it ever "alive" among those users?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How DreamHost Builds Its Cloud: Selecting Hard Drives - kungfudoi https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/2016/10/01/dreamhost-builds-cloud-selecting-hard-drives/ ====== hackuser There's something I don't understand about the enterprise vs consumer (or "client") SSD classification: According to the widely quoted JEDEC standard, JESD218A, [0] these are the date retention standards: Retention Use (power off): * Client: 30° C, 1 year * Enterprise: 40° C, 3 months It's not a typo, I've seen it in many places: It appears that the power-off data retention standard is only 3 months in enterprise drives (1 year in client drives isn't great either). Can anyone explain it? My only guess is that the "enterprise" classification refers to drives designed to churn data 24/7, not store it long-term. But I think many people understand the term 'enterprise' to mean much greater durability. I'd be very disappointed if I experienced dataloss from leaving any drive on a shelf for 3 months, much less an expensive enterprise drive. (Or maybe I misunderstand what's meant by _Retention Use (power off)_?) [0] Available here: [https://www.jedec.org/standards- documents/results/jesd218b.0...](https://www.jedec.org/standards- documents/results/jesd218b.01) and quoted here in the table here: [http://www.kingston.com/us/ssd/enterprise/best_practices/ent...](http://www.kingston.com/us/ssd/enterprise/best_practices/enterprise_versus_client_ssd) ~~~ ilaksh How many studies have been done verifying that enterprise SSDs perform significantly better than consumer SSDs in any metrics? My belief is that the consumer SSDs actually have very similar performance and reliability requirements to the enterprise because they are generally deployed without redundancy, and so any failures can be catastrophic for consumers. And then there are lots of consumers that will go on Amazon or Newegg etc. and leave very bad reviews. So I personally believe the 'enterprise' distinction is mostly a scam, and developers who are looking for inexpensive hosting have been mainly waiting for A) datacenter providers to realize that or B) a slow market perfusion that mitigates it. ~~~ nmjohn > How many studies have been done verifying that enterprise SSDs perform > significantly better than consumer SSDs in any metrics? Define perform. But short answer, lots. To be fair, consumer SSDs these days are pretty solid, and will perform great for most workloads - even many workloads which enterprise drives would be used for. The big difference though, is with extremely heavy write workloads. The endurance of enterprise SSDs in terms of how much data you can write before the drive will fail, is a couple orders of magnitude greater than consumer drives. For example, I have an 800gb Intel S3710 SSD. It's rated to handle 10 DWPD (drive writes per day) - meaning that one could write 8,000 gigabytes of data a day, 365 days a year, for 5 years (~17 petabytes), and the drive will still be chugging away just fine. A 1TB Samsung 850 Pro (which has some of best endurance of consumer ssds), on the other hand is only rated to 300 terabytes of data written. So the enterprise drive has a 60x improvement in endurance. ~~~ ilaksh Do those ratings reflect actual tested durability or mainly marketing? What is the real average durability requirement? Have there not been some relatively large providers using consumer SSDs in the datacenter successfully for some time? ~~~ nmjohn > Do those ratings reflect actual tested durability or mainly marketing? They reflect what the manufacturers will offer the warranty until. A quick google search suggests about 2 petabytes of writes is the max you can get on a samsung 850 before it completely fails (and after 1 petabyte you will have many failed sectors and data corruption starts creeping in) At the same time, I bought my S3710 used and when I got it, it had almost 8 petabytes written and it's still just like new. > Have there not been some relatively large providers using consumer SSDs in > the datacenter successfully for some time? Yes, that wouldn't surprise me at all. Like I said, for many workloads, consumer SSDs are acceptable. But that doesn't mean enterprise drives are a scam. ------ justjonathan This is only my personal experience, bu I am embarrassed to report that I have been in DreamHost customer for over 10 years for hosting some small and unimportant personal projects. I have been consistently disappointed with the level of their engineering and systems. Their systems are unreliable, their custom build ticketing system is atrocious. I would take any technical advice from them with a handful of salt. ~~~ charliepark As a counterpoint (and this is only my personal experience), but I'm happy to report that I've been a DreamHost customer for over 10 years for hosting some small and unimportant personal projects. I've been really happy with everything. Not sure how our usage of their service differs (probably lots!), but I would hate for people to dismiss DreamHost without hearing about a positive experience with them. ~~~ alphapapa Also been a customer for over 10 years. Mostly quite happy. What bugs me about them most right now is their new control panel design. The _log out_ link is at the _bottom left_ , so it gets _pushed off the screen_ when you expand the menus. I have sent at least 3 tickets to them over the course of about 4 months telling them that they need to move the log out link to the top of the page, somewhere in the _copious_ amounts of empty space they have up there. They have responded every time saying they would look into it, pass it along, etc. But nothing's changed. I could fix it myself in 30 seconds by copying and pasting the code in the template. And I can't help but wonder, if they are so incompetent as to not realize that, when the _log out link gets pushed off the page_ , their design is _broken_ , what else are they incompetent with? Security? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how broken it is--do their middle managers or higher- ups not recognize the problem? If not, what other problems do they not recognize? And if my messages to them are not getting through to those who could fix them, that's a problem in their support system. So I would keep an eye on them. I hope they are not beginning to decline. ------ hackuser I recently looked at SSDs for a project I'm working on. By far, the biggest performance impact is in using PCIe rather than SATA interfaces. (The performance boost also may rely on M.2 and/or NVMe; because I don't have a PCIe controller on the system I was working on, I didn't look into it further). An example: Samsung 850 Pro, reputedly one of the fastest SATA SSD drives (SATA 3, 2.5", AHCI): * Sequential read/write: 550/520 MB/s * 4K random read: 100K IOPS Samsung 950 Pro (PCIe 3.0 x4, M.2, NVMe): * Sequential read/write: 2,500/1,500 MB/s * 4K random read: 300K IOPS Source: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd- revie...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd- review-256gb-512gb) ~~~ nickff I use the 850 Pro, and it is very fast, but has many issues with Windows 7 (which is what I have). ~~~ whoopdedo Care to elaborate? I was about to pick one up but now you have me hesitating. ~~~ rincebrain I'm unaware of negative interactions with Win7 and the 850 Pro, having used one in my Win7 desktop for over a year at this point. I can't immediately find anything but one-off reports online that don't line up with each other, either - maybe they're thinking of the 840 line? ~~~ nickff Sorry, that was a typo, I have a 950 pro, and Windows 7 doesn't include an m.2 driver, which causes constant problems with booting and starting up after crashes. The 850 and 840 are both great drives. ------ arca_vorago I've been with drramhost for at least 10 years, but Im about to move everything because of their recent move from open source webmails to only atamail or whatever the new one is called. I spent a lot of time locking down my squirrelmail install, only to login one day and be greeting by a completely different client. Sure they had warnings, but none of those warnings clearly stated the forced move, I thought I could opt out. As for the rest of their service, Their actual server performance is decent, but their VPS offerings dont seem competitive these days, so Im strugling to find a reason to stay. ~~~ rileymat2 I had their VPS, but they do not give you root access. (In fact removed root access from one I used for a few years, screwing a bunch of my stuff up). Kind of a strange definition of VPS they have now. ~~~ dchest This is managed VPS, which is kinda convenient if you don't want to manage servers yourself. For the more "normal" unmanaged VPS with root access, there's DreamCompute. It's even cheaper than DigitalOcean — $4.50 for 512 MB. I recently switched [https://iwl.me](https://iwl.me) to it, and it works well. ~~~ rileymat2 That is fine, but I was using it before those restrictions, which is annoying. Then I switched to Dream Compute and lost the email hosting for the domain. ~~~ dchest Oh, I didn't know it was unrestricted before. (Re-read your comment) Yeah, not good of them to remove such a major feature if it was there before. Why did you lose email for domain? It seems like I still have this option for the domain on DreamCloud (although I also still use their shared hosting). ------ killbrad Forgive my ignorance, but how is this "cloud" instead of VPS?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Majority of Bitcoin mining can give you control over the block chain - onecooldev24 Is is true that if a agent controls majority of the miners on the bitcoin network he/she can control the blockchain? ====== sharemywin [https://learncryptography.com/cryptocurrency/51-attack](https://learncryptography.com/cryptocurrency/51-attack) ~~~ sharemywin Here's a list of other attacks: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses) ------ PaulHoule Yes	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Affective Wear – Recognizing Facial Expressions - kgarten http://kaikunze.de/posts/-affective-wear/ ====== mr_O It reminds me of affective, developed in MIT. I hope this time it will be Open Sourced instead of sold like the other one. I think marketing companies have already enough tools to fool us... ~~~ mr_O * affectiva ([http://www.affectiva.com](http://www.affectiva.com)) ~~~ kgarten they use a camera (so not really practical ;) ) ~~~ mr_O yes I think your approach is the better technical solution.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Pterosaur: Full power of Vim in each Firefox text field - airnomad https://github.com/ardagnir/pterosaur ====== sinkasapa I've really enjoyed the "It's All Text" extension that allows you to use whatever editor you like to edit text fields. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all- text/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/) ~~~ nnethercote Yes, It's All Text is great. A note for anyone using Firefox with Electrolysis (a.k.a e10s or content processes) enabled, e.g. Nightly users: It's All Text is partially busted in that case. E.g. see [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1042965#c2](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1042965#c2). It's still usable, though. ------ michaelmrose While awesome in theory, it seems pretty easy in generic pentadactyl to focus a text field, hit ctrl+i, and have an instance of vim where after you :wq the contents of the buffer will be the contents of the text field. Also compared to a real vim window this lags terribly. ~~~ skymt An extension called It's All Text! provides the same feature without Pentadactyl's total UI overhaul. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all- text/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/) ~~~ edwintorok "It's All Text!" plugin is great for editing wiki pages, or anything with a large amount of text in it. ------ roblabla It seems odd this doesn't use neovim. Wouldn't it be much easier to use neovim rather than raw vim to achieve this kind of result ? ~~~ saidajigumi It should be straightforward to do something similar with neovim. Instead of vim's +clientserver support, communication would be based on neovim's msgpack- rpc api[1]. [1] [http://neovim.org/doc/user/msgpack_rpc.html](http://neovim.org/doc/user/msgpack_rpc.html) ------ Gonzih Oh my goodness, this is amazing. I'm writing this comment using pterosaur. I'm also very happy that it works well with pentadactyl. Great job! Very helpful thing! Before I was using pentadactyl's functionality to open input content in an external editor, but this is so much better. ------ untilHellbanned I don't have any substantive other than to say, great job! This looks really cool. I want to check it out! Any chance you'll bring it to Chrome? ~~~ lightblade [https://github.com/ardagnir/pterosaur/issues/38](https://github.com/ardagnir/pterosaur/issues/38) Looks like it's in the work. ------ sagarjauhari At first I thought its just another vim emulation extensions/plugins that don't really work and are almost useless because you're so used to your customizations. But then I noticed it mentioning that it can use my vimrc! Wow! Now you have my attention! ~~~ e12e Well I'll be... an improvement on "it's all text" (but those trapped in lesser (eh, I mean prefer other) editors might still want to check it out. Shame that modern content-editable widgets (wysiwyg google docs, Facebook etc) will probably break this (too - they break text input in general). ------ nickysielicki I'm one of those people that cannot use a browser without vim bindings, so thank you so much for posting this. I'm going to give it a try. Generally I find that if it's just a standard html form, I actually prefer to have it get piped into urxvt because if I don't want to post it right away, I can simply ':w ~/aaa' and come back later without any worries. Can I do that easily with this? I also like whenever I come across someone doing something messy in javascript (that isn't being blocked by umatrix), and making me fight them, it's nice to just be able to say, "hey, I'm gonna strip anything I've already typed out of the DOM, give it to me, and I'll give it back when you learn to play nice. No jsoup for you." So yeah. I like how it is for me. Of course, everyone does. [https://xkcd.com/1172/](https://xkcd.com/1172/) ~~~ cbd1984 [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all- text/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/) This lets you edit text fields in a real text editor of your choice. ------ wodenokoto I have been looking for better text editing when using iPython/juPyter notebooks. This looks like a really cool solution! ~~~ lp251 You might want to look at vimception[1], an iPython plugin to use CodeMirror's vim mode inside iPython cells. It yet hasn't been updated to work with iPython 3.0. [1] [https://github.com/ivanov/ipython- vimception](https://github.com/ivanov/ipython-vimception) ------ TazeTSchnitzel It's interesting to me that this uses your native vim installation. I was expecting vim compiled to asm.js! ------ PebblesHD As someone who cannot understand the attraction of Vim (and emacs) I can only say oh god why... Otherwise, brilliant use of integration between two usually very seperate programs, nice! This is something I wouldn't have thought posssible ------ michaelmrose Its also worth mentioning that its totally broken if you use vim-startify [https://github.com/mhinz/vim-startify](https://github.com/mhinz/vim- startify). ------ chilicuil it doesn't work in FF 27.x, but it's a good idea though, integration must be quite good. In the meantime and if integration is not an issue, you could try vim-anywhere which is a more general way to get vim well anywhere =) [https://github.com/cknadler/vim-anywhere](https://github.com/cknadler/vim- anywhere) [http://sprunge.us/hiFY](http://sprunge.us/hiFY) (personal revision, posix sh) ~~~ glandium Did you really mean 27 or meant 37? Because 27 is more than a year old and not one of the long term support releases, so if you're using 27, you're exposing yourself to all sorts of exploits. If you really meant 27, then I can only guess you're trying to avoid the new theme (which started in 29, so you could have been using 28), and that's a poor reason to stay with an old unsupported browser. Upgrade to 36 and use [https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/classicthemerestore...](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/classicthemerestorer/) instead. ------ Gonzih And plugin is no longer officially maintained :( ------ skz Is there something like this for emacs? ------ vps anyone else noticing the window server process taking up a lot of cpu usage?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
To save on weight, a detour to the moon is the best route to Mars - jimsojim http://news.mit.edu/2015/mars-mission-save-weight-fuel-on-moon-1015 ====== Ankaios “This is completely against the established common wisdom of how to go to Mars, which is a straight shot to Mars, carry everything with you,” de Weck says. “The idea of taking a detour into the lunar system … it’s very unintuitive." and later... “Assuming you can extract these resources, what do you do with it? Almost nobody has looked at that question.” Give me a break. People discuss this sort of approach all the time. They don't necessarily publish their conclusions, though. ~~~ avmich They do sometimes; a lunar resources conference, in the aftermath of Apollo missions, had discussions regarding use of Moon regolith for things like refueling. ~~~ Ankaios Yeah, there's loads of great analysis of lunar resource use from that era, and propellant for use beyond the Moon is a major motivation for the current interest in lunar polar volatiles. For them to act like the notion that lunar resources could be valuable for trips elsewhere is a major revelation is ridiculous. ------ givan We still use chemical propulsion almost everywhere from cars to rocket engines, a breakthrough in propulsion systems will not only make solar system exploration feasible but will be greatly beneficial to our society by reducing pollution and costs. We need the next steam engine for a new industrial revolution, space exploration and our society depends on it. I think that all space resources should be channeled into this, our current approach to solar system exploration is the same as trying to explore the world by foot, expensive an inefficient and no matter how big our ambitions are we don't have the technology to accomplish them. ~~~ raducu Exactly! Nuclear thermal rockets/fission-fragment rockets are the way to go, but you can't launch them directly from Earth because of the nuclear fallout. ~~~ Gravityloss Well, you can't use them for launch. And there's lots of other options for in- space propulsion. The specific impulse is "only" double that of chemical ones, and there's potentially a large dry mass penalty. ~~~ raducu You mean the specific impulse for nuclear thermal rockets, as far as I know the fission fragment rockets have ISPs in the 10^5 range. ------ Nexialist You can already produce fuel on Mars itself using the Sabatier Reaction with technology available today, you have to bring along a little hydrogen but that's not too big of a deal. Refueling on the moon requires an (almost pointless) web of infrastructure that balloons the cost of a mission, and more importantly, increases the time to carry out the mission. Each US administration has a habit of cancelling the more ambitious NASA/JPL projects of the previous one, so if we really want to go to mars, it has to be a mission doable in as short a time span as possible, such as proposed by Zubrin's Mars Direct plan. ------ sandworm101 Does anyone writing these papers have any appreciation for the difficulties of producing liquid H2 appropriate for use in manned rockets? This is some seriously tricky stuff. Turning water into liquid H2 is one thing, making it out of dirty moon-frost is another. A little impurity here and there and your rocket engine becomes a bomb. ~~~ avmich Detander - a gas liquifier - can be pretty small and lightweight even for a big flow. Industrial hydrogen liquifiers are built routinely since 1950s if not earlier. If you're trying to liquify hydrogen, you'll find out that most - almost all - impurities in the gas become liquid or solid before hydrogen becomes liquid. That's a good way to clean hydrogen, so you won't have an odd mixture as the result. ------ Gravityloss Asteroids are even better for resource utilization. They might be far away in space but a lot closer by delta vee, and they can be reached, mined and escaped with low maximum thrust, meaning very efficient propulsion methods can be used. This discussion just goes around in the same stupid circles for decades. We know so many better ways of doing things, but they can not be done for political / PR reasons. ------ p4bl0 If you have one hour if front of you, I highly recommend this documentary: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcTZvNLL0-w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcTZvNLL0-w) In it they explain how it would be feasible to be on Mars in ten years with current technology and not so much additional fundings. ------ golergka I've done that in KSP, seems to be working. ~~~ sandworm101 Do it in RSS, or even 64k. Stock KSP is a tiny tiny place. ~~~ runholm Doesn't that just increase the gain of doing the refueling? ------ rl3 Seeing as the title could be a bit misleading, I'm glad the article clarifies: > _Ishimatsu says the research demonstrates the importance of establishing a > resource-producing infrastructure in space. He emphasizes that such > infrastructure may not be necessary for a first trip to Mars. But a resource > network in space would enable humans to make the journey repeatedly in a > sustainable way._ In other words if we want to get to Mars ASAP, setting up lunar mining and refueling infrastructure probably isn't the fastest way to go about that, even if it is more mass efficient. ~~~ IndianAstronaut I am curious as to why we just don't set that up on Mars to begin with. Set up a manufacturing infrastructure and an agricultural base. ~~~ chisleu Because everything you take to mars costs ~68% more fuel to get off of earth. Getting off of Earth is much harder than getting off of the moon, which has ~86% less gravity. If you only take enough fuel to get to the moon, then you can load up there and enjoy a significantly easier time to get up to speed on the way to Mars. I didn't see how much of a percentage difference it is in total fuel though, in the article. I'm expecting it is pretty close or they would have cited it instead of the Earth liftoff reduction. ~~~ Cshelton Well another consideration is the additional time added to the Mars trip. Right now, going directly from Earth, around Earth a bunch of times, then straight to Mars will be 6-9 months one way, which I believe the opportunity to come back would be ~2 years after arriving (I may be wrong here). So, assuming we are doing a round trip and not one way, it's already a 3 year trip ish? Either way, I see building a launching space station orbiting earth as the best way. Use smaller rockets like the falcon 9, get a bunch of fuel into orbit, build the ship from many parts and trips, then launch from Earths orbit. Make the built ship reusable for many Mars trips. Like in the Martian... ~~~ TeMPOraL A fuel station in LEO may be convenient, but it will still be much cheaper to ship fuel from the Moon than from the surface, Δv-wise. Per a handy Δv map[0], it's about 2.5km/s (if you aerobrake) vs. almost 10km/s to lift fuel from Earth. [0] - [http://i.imgur.com/SqdzxzF.png](http://i.imgur.com/SqdzxzF.png) ~~~ sandworm101 Aerobrake a couple tons of liquid H2 and O2 in earth's atmosphere? Assuming it doesn't all boil off, it would certainly make for some nice fireworks. ~~~ TeMPOraL Add moar heatshields, eh? ;). Also, I was thinking more about dipping in the atmo a little, doing the kind of aerobraking the ISS has to fight all the time. You don't have to make the entire insertion in one orbit. ~~~ sandworm101 A slow series of aerobrakes would run up against the time factor. Today's H2 storage boils off about 1% per day. So if you spend a few weeks slowing things down gradually you quickly defeat the advantage as much of your fuel has escaped. ~~~ TeMPOraL Didn't consider that. Thanks! EDIT: Maybe there are some improvements for storage available that don't make sense on Earth given H₂ prices? A magnetic containment field, perhaps? Or whatever chemistry shenanigans are used for hydrogen fuel cells? You would be trading the time factor for mass and volume (the latter doesn't matter that much in space, and could even help with aeroinsertion), but it may still add up moneywise. ------ droithomme Interesting. This was the claim of the Bush administration, that the moon was the route to Mars, but that program was cancelled after being ridiculed. ------ Johnny555 This point is key: "assuming the availability of resources and fuel-generating infrastructure on the moon" Sure, if the moon is a gas station, then stopping there to fuel up on the way to mars makes sense. But it's making a big leap of faith that refueling infrastructure and raw materials can be reasonably built on the moon. ~~~ TeMPOraL ESA seems to be interested in pushing that angle. The recent announcement was very refreshing to hear[0]. I like to imagine it's Musk radiating enthusiasm for rubbing progress into our faces, but whatever it is, something seem to have caused a renewed interest in manned space projects. Maybe it's just ESA and NASA stepping up their PR game. But whatever it is, I'm thankful and have high hopes! [0] - [http://www.space.com/29285-moon-base-european-space- agency.h...](http://www.space.com/29285-moon-base-european-space-agency.html) ------ roflchoppa if you remove mass from the moon for fuel, does that not effect the orbit of the moon, and with that the tides? ~~~ TeMPOraL If you start spinning counterclockwise, you're robbing Earth of angular momentum and shortening the day. Source: [https://xkcd.com/162/](https://xkcd.com/162/). The point is, Moon is big. It will be long, long time before we could do anything there that could make a measurable difference in Moon's orbital parameters or tidal forces it generates. ------ Sir_Cmpwn Another issue with this would be that a Mars vehicle would probably be big, and to a large extent designed to never land on anything. Getting it down to the Moon safely and back out again would be very complicated. The solution is to do a fuel run with a smaller craft that can disengage from the main craft several times, but then you're doing several landings and takeoffs and that's going to shoot the risk WAY up. I think that we would be wise to invest in a space elevator on the Moon. We can't support one on Earth with currently understood technology, but the Moon is different and it could be done with modern materials. A plan of this sort would seriously reduce the cost of lunar development and increase the viability of the plan in the article. ~~~ phire The risk of multiple moon landings and takeoffs is really quite small as the moon has no atmosphere. Perhaps not mission critical small, it might be in the range of 0.1-2% risk for each landing/takeoff cycle. So if you require 10 refuelling launches, your total risk is 1-20%. Say you had a large moon lander, or multiple landers that make up a robotic fuel collection and refining system. Then you have a reusable lander-launcher that lands, collects the fuel and delivers whatever it doesn't use for takeoff/landing into a orbital fuel deport orbiting either the moon or earth. Actually might be best to have your deport orbiting the moon until it's full then send it on a slow, low-fuel, multi-month path back to earth orbit, perhaps you meet the Mars transfer vehicle there. If at any point the fuel transfer lander-launcher fails, you can launch a new one from earth and push back your Mars mission. Perhaps you have multiple fuel transfer landers as a contingency, or to increase throughput (fuel in orbit isn't just useful for a single Mars mission) Only once you have your fuel ready, do you launch your Mars crew. You could do a similar setup at Mars to collect fuel for your trip and avoid having to drag that fuel from the moon. But a Mars fuel transfer lander-launch would be much more complex and risky, and it would be a lot harder to land the fuel collection/refining facility. ~~~ Sir_Cmpwn Don't forget to add the rendezvous risk. It would also be extremely difficult to try and send it to meet the vehicle during the Mars transfer - the launch window eventually closes, and even during the launch window the ideal trajectories are quite different. ------ greglindahl Another way to "save on weight" is to use the lowest-cost launch from Earth, and rendezvous in orbit. We're going to know what the risk and cost of reusable Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy is long before we'd start building this lunar base. A 75% reduction in SpaceX's already low launch rates would be a big savings. We even have experience launching fuel to ISS on the Russian and European unmanned supply ships. ------ yCloser I bet the author just installed Kerbal Space Program... ------ LoSboccacc Can't find paper but I wonder if he'd taken into account near future technologies, like orbital construction (look at the IIS, that was 'built' in orbit) and fully reusable rockets. Anyway I do believe we need to establish a resource operation on moon just because debugging a resource operation on mars as our first space colony would be all too risky. ------ atomicbeanie I first read about this idea in [http://www.amazon.com/Orthogonal-Galaxy-Book- ebook/dp/B00QD3...](http://www.amazon.com/Orthogonal-Galaxy-Book- ebook/dp/B00QD35580/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital- text&ie=UTF8&qid=1445001975&sr=1-1&keywords=Michael+Lewis+Galaxy) ------ Armisael16 Obviously getting a chance to refuel en route is huge for saving dv - the rocket equation is a harsh mistress. Honestly, I'm a little surprised that it isn't more efficient to move the fuel for lunar orbit to LEO. ~~~ TeMPOraL If you're flying prograde wrt. the Moon, you'll still be burning enough Δv to reach the Moon, so it may seem to be more efficient to just get yourself captured there, fuel up, and continue away. I haven't had time to play KSP in half a year, so my intuition may be a little off. ------ jackreichert On a similar note, I do think that best way to get a shot at better and more investments in space would be to build a hotel on the moon. (Maybe I should submit my blogpost about that to a journal to get academic cred.) ------ greesil Oh wat no slingshot? ~~~ lucaspiller Once you've refuelled on the Moon, you can do an Earth flyby (with a small burn) to reduce the delta-v required to escape the Earth-Moon system. This is what the Nozomi craft tried to do: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nozomi_%28spacecraft%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nozomi_%28spacecraft%29) ------ foota But what about the mass depletion to the moon! ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress))	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
EquipmentShare (YC W15) Is Like Airbnb for Construction Equipment - sunilkumarc http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/09/equipmentshare/ ====== sitkack Isn't this Hertz, Sunbelt or United? I see how this is a startup, get people with capital equipment sitting around, monetize it, make a cut of the transaction. But seriously, this is a feature of one the three I just mentioned. Look at how Hertz and Enterprise have taken on the self service car competition and at the same time made it a non-starter to run your own fleet. Same exact thing. You have an extremely small window to execute. The only reason to own is for chain of custody and latency, if you can "solve" those problems, done. Most construction companies don't own anyways. ------ MatthewMcDonald Co-Founder here. Happy to answer any questions. ~~~ DevFactor PLEASE stop using the advertisement "like AirBnB for x". I swear all of the YC companies are using it now. ~~~ jessaustin IDK the description seems to fit. What's wrong with terms of art? ------ bau5 There's also [http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/27/with-1-8m-from- andreessen-c...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/27/with-1-8m-from-andreessen- chris-sacca-more-rental-marketplace-getable-digs-into-the-32b-construction- market/) ~~~ MatthewMcDonald We're aware of Getable. We see them as more of a middleman between contractors and rental companies, whereas we focus on helping contractors lend out idle equipment. ------ cpursley Just sent this to my father who owns a commercial landscaping company. His skid-steers sit unused 80% of the time. And other times he has to rent specific equipment just for a few days. Great idea. ------ jessaustin Wow. Limited release, to Missouri? I didn't think we got _anything_ first. I expect several people in my family will try this out. Off the top of my head, some challenges: _Insurance_ Equipment can be rendered unusable in so many ways. It's not even in the same ballpark as an Airbnb guest ruining the carpet. You've _got_ to have insurance for this. Who pays? How much? Does anyone even want to offer insurance to this market? The "About" page mentions verification, which in theory might reduce EquipmentShare's risk, but I wonder. It _won 't_ be the same as insurance sold to existing rental companies. I doubt that a standard contractor's worksite insurance plan covers this either. _Maintenance_ Most of the equipment pictured on the website requires _daily_ maintenance by a qualified operator or mechanic. Sure, the interval gets stretched, but that's usually by the owner or her agents, so they get what's coming to them. I understand that this is the primary headache for equipment rental places, but they are better able to deal with it than an individual contractor would be, and typically they know their customers pretty well before they e.g. rent a Bobcat for a month. _Mobilization_ If it fits in the back of a pickup, this probably won't be a problem. Lots of stuff doesn't. Who is hauling the equipment? When? Is it a separate fee? Does the hauler have insurance that will cover the value of the equipment? (Is that the sort of thing that we should leave to reviews?) _Fees per what?_ Lots of stuff is fine to rent by the day. If it has an engine, however, it's often better to rent by the operating hour. If the lessee just wants to use something for an hour a day, however, minimum fees might be appropriate. This could get complex. _Find the right model for older equipment_ With old enough heavy equipment, operating costs swamp equipment value. That is, if you have an old bulldozer sitting out in a field, it's costing you nothing. (The capital is fully depreciated.) If you then use it for a month, you're going to have to replace all the many filters a couple of times, run a couple of buckets of oil through it a day, fix all the dry-rotted hydraulic hoses, locate and repair some seals, replace both batteries, locate and fix clogged grease fittings, and then pray that nothing big like a pump or a turbo goes out. If this stuff is the lessor's responsibility, the rental fee will need to be higher than one might expect. If it's the lessee's, it won't get done, the machine will be ready for the scrapyard after a week, and one might expect lawsuits. The right model _might_ be "don't allow old junk", but this is an area where this service can differentiate itself from existing equipment rental, so maybe not. Actually now that I think about it, this service might be better for specialty tools like hammerdrills and scaffolding than it would be for motorized equipment like that pictured on the landing page. Fewer details, and less money on the line in case of disaster. One suggestion I would definitely make would be to sign up existing rental companies and equipment dealers (perhaps through a separate website if you don't want to confuse contractors). They have a lot of existing inventory and will view this as another sales channel. ~~~ MatthewMcDonald Thanks for your comments and suggestions! Would love to hear from anyone you know in Missouri that's interested. > Insurance Insurance is a huge pain for equipment. Most of the contractors we've encountered have an insurance policy that covers rental. Those that do not must pay ~15% to be added to a 3rd party insurance policy. We do not allow uninsured rentals to occur through our site. > Maintenance We work with mechanics in the area to have equipment automatically serviced when it's needed > Mobilization If you need the equipment delivered, we have agreements with towing companies. There is a fee for this (depends on weight, distance, etc). > Fees per what? We charge per day, for the very reason you pointed out (complexity). We haven't had any pushback about this so far, but if we do we'll look at it. > Find the right model for older equipment We don't have an official policy on what can be listed and what cant, but "don't allow old junk" isn't far from the mark. We're also collecting reviews and rating information, which will help us filter out equipment that gives a bad experience.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Is it still relevant to send you website to DMOZ - fffrad I rarely if ever hear people suggesting dmoz.org anymore. It used to be the craze when I was getting started in web development and SEO<p>Did dmoz become irrelevant? Do you even go to dmoz ever? Are search engines not considering its weight anymore? ====== nperez I would vote that it is not relevant. Maybe someone has information that I don't which would sway my view, but I doubt search engines rely on it anymore and nobody uses web directories anymore. ------ MichaelCrawford I'm not so sure it's actually irrelevant, however it had been two or three months since I submitted a site that I'm working on, and it hasn't been added yet.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Honeybadger Chrome Extension - jaequery http://gethoneybadger.com ====== tzaman The orange nearly killed my eyes. Apart from that, why do you use fake testimonials? I'm assuming that, since in the bottom you have a person, called "Antonina K. Director of Operations, TrustGuard". The lady on the picture is Sarah Parmenter: [http://ios-blog.co.uk/featured-posts/sarah-parmenter-web- and...](http://ios-blog.co.uk/featured-posts/sarah-parmenter-web-and-ui- designer/) ~~~ jaequery Please understand this is a beta release, I've cut many corners left and right to just get it out as it is. ~~~ drcoopster I'm not sure that blatant testimonial fabrication and deception is really cutting corners. ~~~ DanielStraight Not to mention using someone's likeness to endorse your product without their permission. I would imagine that is actually illegal. ~~~ jt2190 I knew a professional photographer who loved it when websites used his images without permission, because he made a lot more money. ------ davidw Ok, but what's it doing behind the scenes? I'm not sure I'd trust something that's exchanging data about what I'm browsing with a lot of sites... ~~~ jaequery Hi David, well I should make it clear that it does nothing else behind the scenes other than make an HTTP call to get website data only when you hit click to get the data, that's about the only thing it does. I get wary of other extensions too when I install but I can tell you this app does not track sites you browse if that's your concern (you can inspect it yourself and see). ~~~ MDCore > but I can tell you this app does not track sites you browse Except for this snippet of code in popup.js of course. var _gaq = _gaq \|\| []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-40692955-5']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); Edit: I tested this with a console.log, and it output immediately on page load, without clicking anything. ~~~ uptownhr Not that's its impossible but popup.js is local to the extension. ------ andyhmltn Nice little app! Just a little honest observation though: Is anything in the tech section actually true? I just checked my personal site and it came up with technologies I've never heard of. It also said I use 'bitpay' for payments ~~~ jaequery Thanks for pointing that out, there is a technical difficulty with the builtwith stats right now, looking into it. ~~~ andyhmltn Awesome nice work! ------ quasque Your whois lookup is broken for ac.uk domains - for example, all of these requests return the whois data for ac.uk itself, rather than the specified domain: [http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/ox.ac.uk](http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/ox.ac.uk) [http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/cam.ac.uk](http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/cam.ac.uk) [http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/dur.ac.uk](http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/dur.ac.uk) (This list might help to uncover other problems like this: [https://publicsuffix.org/](https://publicsuffix.org/)) ------ robmcm The fact you have a quote from "Antonina K. Director of Operations, TrustGuard" with a photo of "Sarah Parmenter, Owner of You Know Who" makes me think you made them up. I wonder how many testimonials on the web are actually real? ~~~ outworlder That depends. Do you require them to be in their original context and be still current? If not, yes, I have seen some "real" ones. ------ wbond Interesting little tool, however, the "Built With" section was 100% incorrect/random for the few sites I checked. ~~~ ohadron For me as well. Seems completely random and false even for things that are extremely easy to detect such as Google Analytics. ------ sullivanmatt I will start by saying that the site color scheme is pretty sharp for my eyes. I think you'll have a more polished look by having the background be white with a more neutral color palette. For the extension itself: I like that it doesn't call out for information unless called upon, but if I ask for information about a site, I see no reason for you to have to collect the full URL and POST it to /track. That could lead to unexpected data leakage (as some URLs could be sensitive). You should probably get those API calls over to using HTTPS as well. Also with every lookup, my console gets the log message "asdf", which is kind of weird. One thing I noticed is that the extension is pretty slow to get information. It appears it calls out for each item individually, and this leads to seven unique calls to your API that could be condensed into one request / response. If an API call fails with a 500 error, the entire stacktrace is dumped to the user. You'll want to disable debugging mode in your Express app to ensure that doesn't happen. Since these APIs are public, you might want to consider rate limiting by IP, or you might find that your extension isn't the only consumer of them. A free and open WHOIS or Geolocation API that responds with JSON could be abused by other app developers, and having that already around moves the cost from them to you. ------ gyardley It might be an awesome extension, but if it's not related to the company at honeybadger.io, you need to rename the thing. Even if the similarity was completely inadvertent, it's just going to lead to confusion and legal hassle, and could end up hurting your reputation more than the functionality of the extension will help it. ~~~ dingaling A more traditional name for honey badger is the Boer 'ratel'. It's also catchier - might make a better product name. ------ rubiquity Were you aware that an exception handling service named Honeybadger already exists?[0] 0 - [https://honeybadger.io](https://honeybadger.io) ~~~ sergiotapia I actually thought this would integrate somehow to the service. So you're telling me this is completely unrelated to Honeybadger the company? ~~~ rubiquity As far as I can tell, yes this is completely unrelated to Honeybadger the company. ------ raghavb The most useful/interesting for me is the technology section. As that's not the easiest to get data about. Unfortunately the info that its giving is completely false/random. Checked it on a few websites that I've built or know the stack and the info shown is completely wrong. www.builtwith.com provides much more information but they do not have a chrome plugin that I'm aware of. Definitely should check it out if your interested in this plugin. ~~~ jaequery Could you give me an example of a site you did? Although I know it's not 100% accurate, from my experience, they were fairly accurate. I am pulling data from builtwith.com btw. ~~~ dukekarthik builtwith.com shows proper data but the extension shows completely random information. ~~~ jaequery so apparently we ran out of credits on builtwith. :( ------ bichiliad So you know, your "Leave Feedback" button seems to lead to a survey / feedback form for "Competition Tab," rather than Honeybadger. Edit: For what it's worth, if the plugin really does what it says it does on the Chrome Webstore page, it sounds really, really useful. Will try later. ------ jaequery I'm sure this extension will serve useful to you as it has done for me and my colleagues. Hope you enjoy it! ~~~ drdaeman Mind-blown! I can't browse websites without it! /s ------ lorenzhs Injecting Google Analytics into each and every page I visit is not cool, mate... I uninstalled it again. ~~~ uptownhr GA is not being injected into pages. it's only tracking the times you click on the extension button. ------ mtford So, HN was built with Stiqr and reddit was built with Website Tonight...? ~~~ jaequery Ah, I see what you guys are saying now. I'll have to look it up why its doing this! ------ sudhirj The Technology section is completely off the mark and seems to be choosing servers and partners completely at random. Where are you pulling it from? ~~~ jaequery yes its definitely off the mark at the moment, i'll be looking into it. ------ LukeB_UK The site gives me absolutely no information about what this extension actually does. "Juicy informations" could literally be anything. ------ king-coconut Doesn't really work, shows only a blank white window, no info visible on any of the sites I tried. Does the plugin work through www-proxy? ------ sudhirj Am I the only one trying to figure out when the intro video was made based on the HN frontpage it shows? ~~~ dewey May 16, 11:17 PM. Top right corner ;) ------ icefox So what does it do? The text on the webpage doesn't actually say. ~~~ Bassetts > At the mere click of a button, our honeybadger will let you see how much > traffic the site gets, how much money they raised, what powers their stack, > and much more. ------ ryangripp Now we just need a Honeybadger Firefox edition ------ drcoopster You couldn't come up with a less-lame name? And the "leave feedback" button being a mailing list subscription form? ------ BaconJuice those testimonials seem fake? are they fake?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Microsoft Signals It Would Rather Talk To An Icahn-Controlled Yahoo - nickb http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/07/microsoft-signals-it-would-rather-talk-to-an-icahn-controlled-yahoo/ ====== pg Of course they would. Icahn couldn't actually run Yahoo. So if they were negotiating with him they'd be negotiating with someone who didn't have the option of remaining independent. ~~~ raganwald Absolutely. I love their statement that they will not negotiate with Yahoo's current board. I interpret that to mean that Steve Ballmer does not like to negotiate with people who say "no" to him. ------ TweedHeads Icahn's whole point is to make a couple of billions from this transaction, he has no interest whatsoever in Yahoo or the shareholders. Why on earth would a company want to sell just the most valuable part of its business instead of selling it all?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How much does employee turnover really cost? - wyclif https://medium.com/latticehq/how-much-does-employee-turnover-really-cost-d61df5eed151 ====== wyclif I'm still constantly told by engineering friends that the easiest way to get a raise is to get a new job. That indicates to me that employers aren't that worried about the costs of turnover.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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